CIA knows more than ?we?re able to say? about
WASHINGTON: CIA Director Porter Goss, saying his agency struggles to penetrate terrorist sanctuaries overseas, insists that 'we know more than we?re able to say publicly' about Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
In a rare television interview, Goss defended the CIA?s track record, which has been tarnished by allegations ranging from erroneous or hyped intelligence leading to the war in Iraq to reports the agency runs secret prisons abroad for terrorism suspects and uses harsh interrogation techniques amounting to torture.
'What we do does not come close to torture,' Goss said, though he declined to elaborate on the agency?s interrogation techniques.
Al-Qaeda leaders Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi haven?t been found 'primarily because they don?t want us to find them and they?re going to great lengths to make sure we don?t find them,' Goss said in the interview broadcast on Tuesday on US television station ABC?s 'Good Morning America.' 'We?re applying a lot of efforts to find out where they are.'
He insisted the CIA knows 'a good deal more' about the men 'than we?re able to say publicly.' Goss said one of the hardest parts of the CIA?s mission is to 'penetrate into some of the sanctuary areas' _ whether harsh terrain or 'at the heart of a city, in a ghetto or slum area where people don?t regularly go.'
'Knowing how to find those places and getting to penetrate them is going to be the hardest part of this business,' he said. Even with the CIA?s mistakes, Goss said, the agency is 'the gold standard by any measure' in terms of human intelligence. 'We don?t get it right every time,' he said, 'but I don?t think there?s anybody who could even come close.'
Reports have surfaced recently that the CIA runs secret prisons in Europe for detaining and interrogating suspects. The US has not confirmed those reports, and Goss did not address them directly.
'We?re fighting a war on terror,' he said in response to a question about the prisons. 'We?re doing quite well. Inevitably, we?re going to have to capture some terrorists and inevitably they?re going to have to have some due process. It?s going to be done lawfully.'
The interview was taped inside the operations room at the agency?s headquarters in suburban Langley, Virginia. A red light flashed throughout the interview, indicating there was someone in the room who did not have a security clearance _ the interviewer, ABC?s Charles Gibson."
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
LOS ALAMOS / Plutonium could be missing from lab / 600-plus pounds unaccounted for, activist group says
LOS ALAMOS / Plutonium could be missing from lab / 600-plus pounds unaccounted for, activist group says
~~~~~and who, pray tell, has been in a bidding war for this lab? Think it will get any "better" under government crony control?
LOS ALAMOS
Plutonium could be missing from lab
600-plus pounds unaccounted for, activist group says
- Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Enough plutonium to make dozens of nuclear bombs hasn't been accounted for at the UC-run Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and may be missing, an activist group says in a new report.
There is no evidence that the weapons-grade plutonium has been stolen or diverted for illegal purposes, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research said. However, the amount of unaccounted-for plutonium -- more than 600 pounds, and possibly several times that -- is so great that it raises "a vast security issue," the group said in a report to be made public today.
The institute, which is based in Takoma Park, Md., says it compared data from five publicly available reports and documents issued by the U.S. Energy Department and Los Alamos from 1996 to 2004 and found inconsistencies in them. It says the records aren't clear on what the lab did with the plutonium, a byproduct of nuclear bomb research at Los Alamos.
A spokesman for UC, which manages the national laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore for the Energy Department, did not address the report's specifics but said the New Mexico lab tracks nuclear material "to a minute quantity."
The report says there are several possible explanations for what happened to the plutonium. They include:
-- It was discarded in unsafe amounts in landfills at the Los Alamos lab. It is legal to discard weapons-grade plutonium in landfills, one of which is 40 feet deep, as long as the substance is sufficiently diluted. However, if a landfill holds too much plutonium, the material can eventually contaminate the environment -- for example by leeching into groundwater or being absorbed by the roots of plants -- study co-author Arjun Makhijani said in an interview.
-- It was shipped to an Energy Department burial site in a New Mexico salt mine, without accurate records of such shipments being kept.
-- It was stolen or otherwise shipped off site for unknown reasons.
"If it has left the site, then it obviously has the most grievous security implications," Makhijani said. "I cannot say that it has left the site, but the government has the responsibility to ensure that it has not.
"And the University (of California) obviously has a responsibility in this. It should be a grave embarrassment for the university to be sitting on numbers like this and discrepancies like this, and not have resolved them."
UC spokesman Chris Harrington said Los Alamos "does an annual inventory of special nuclear materials which is overseen by (the Energy Department). These inventories have been occurring for 20-plus years. Special nuclear materials are carefully tracked to a minute quantity."
The report concludes that at least 661 pounds of plutonium generated at the lab over the last half-century is not accounted for. The atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 contained about 13 pounds of plutonium.
"The security implications . . . are extremely serious, since less than 2 percent of the lowest unaccounted-for plutonium is enough to make one nuclear bomb," the report said.
The problem of plutonium accounting began worrying lab critics in the mid-1990s, when Energy Department officials released lab records as part of the Clinton administration's openness initiative.
Critics found they had trouble determining exactly what the lab was doing with the plutonium waste that is generated during the manufacture of spherical plutonium "pits," the fissile triggers of nuclear bombs.
Makhijani said he and colleagues from two other activist groups hoped the problem would be resolved in August 2004, when they sent a letter of complaint to then-Los Alamos Director G. Peter Nanos. Nanos was trying to reform lab operations after highly publicized scandals over UC management of Los Alamos.
Nanos and lab officials did not respond, though, and nine months later Nanos left for a different job. Makhijani said he and associates had decided to make their report public to dramatize federal officials' failure to resolve the puzzle of the missing plutonium.
Makhijani received his engineering doctorate at UC Berkeley with specialization in plasma physics and nuclear fusion. The institute is funded by sources including the Ford Foundation and San Francisco's Ploughshares Fund.
UC has joined Bechtel National and other industrial partners in a bid to retain its contract to run Los Alamos, in a competition against a consortium consisting of Lockheed-Martin, the University of Texas, several New Mexico universities and various industrial partners.
Makhijani says he isn't taking sides in the competition but that he would prefer the weapons labs be run by industrial contractors rather than universities. The reason, he said, is that university connections to the weapons labs tend to lead to restraints on free inquiry and speech within the universities.
E-mail the author at kdavidson@sfchronicle.com.
Page B - 1
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/30/BAGGQFVT7J1.DTL
~~~~~and who, pray tell, has been in a bidding war for this lab? Think it will get any "better" under government crony control?
LOS ALAMOS
Plutonium could be missing from lab
600-plus pounds unaccounted for, activist group says
- Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Enough plutonium to make dozens of nuclear bombs hasn't been accounted for at the UC-run Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and may be missing, an activist group says in a new report.
There is no evidence that the weapons-grade plutonium has been stolen or diverted for illegal purposes, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research said. However, the amount of unaccounted-for plutonium -- more than 600 pounds, and possibly several times that -- is so great that it raises "a vast security issue," the group said in a report to be made public today.
The institute, which is based in Takoma Park, Md., says it compared data from five publicly available reports and documents issued by the U.S. Energy Department and Los Alamos from 1996 to 2004 and found inconsistencies in them. It says the records aren't clear on what the lab did with the plutonium, a byproduct of nuclear bomb research at Los Alamos.
A spokesman for UC, which manages the national laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore for the Energy Department, did not address the report's specifics but said the New Mexico lab tracks nuclear material "to a minute quantity."
The report says there are several possible explanations for what happened to the plutonium. They include:
-- It was discarded in unsafe amounts in landfills at the Los Alamos lab. It is legal to discard weapons-grade plutonium in landfills, one of which is 40 feet deep, as long as the substance is sufficiently diluted. However, if a landfill holds too much plutonium, the material can eventually contaminate the environment -- for example by leeching into groundwater or being absorbed by the roots of plants -- study co-author Arjun Makhijani said in an interview.
-- It was shipped to an Energy Department burial site in a New Mexico salt mine, without accurate records of such shipments being kept.
-- It was stolen or otherwise shipped off site for unknown reasons.
"If it has left the site, then it obviously has the most grievous security implications," Makhijani said. "I cannot say that it has left the site, but the government has the responsibility to ensure that it has not.
"And the University (of California) obviously has a responsibility in this. It should be a grave embarrassment for the university to be sitting on numbers like this and discrepancies like this, and not have resolved them."
UC spokesman Chris Harrington said Los Alamos "does an annual inventory of special nuclear materials which is overseen by (the Energy Department). These inventories have been occurring for 20-plus years. Special nuclear materials are carefully tracked to a minute quantity."
The report concludes that at least 661 pounds of plutonium generated at the lab over the last half-century is not accounted for. The atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 contained about 13 pounds of plutonium.
"The security implications . . . are extremely serious, since less than 2 percent of the lowest unaccounted-for plutonium is enough to make one nuclear bomb," the report said.
The problem of plutonium accounting began worrying lab critics in the mid-1990s, when Energy Department officials released lab records as part of the Clinton administration's openness initiative.
Critics found they had trouble determining exactly what the lab was doing with the plutonium waste that is generated during the manufacture of spherical plutonium "pits," the fissile triggers of nuclear bombs.
Makhijani said he and colleagues from two other activist groups hoped the problem would be resolved in August 2004, when they sent a letter of complaint to then-Los Alamos Director G. Peter Nanos. Nanos was trying to reform lab operations after highly publicized scandals over UC management of Los Alamos.
Nanos and lab officials did not respond, though, and nine months later Nanos left for a different job. Makhijani said he and associates had decided to make their report public to dramatize federal officials' failure to resolve the puzzle of the missing plutonium.
Makhijani received his engineering doctorate at UC Berkeley with specialization in plasma physics and nuclear fusion. The institute is funded by sources including the Ford Foundation and San Francisco's Ploughshares Fund.
UC has joined Bechtel National and other industrial partners in a bid to retain its contract to run Los Alamos, in a competition against a consortium consisting of Lockheed-Martin, the University of Texas, several New Mexico universities and various industrial partners.
Makhijani says he isn't taking sides in the competition but that he would prefer the weapons labs be run by industrial contractors rather than universities. The reason, he said, is that university connections to the weapons labs tend to lead to restraints on free inquiry and speech within the universities.
E-mail the author at kdavidson@sfchronicle.com.
Page B - 1
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/30/BAGGQFVT7J1.DTL
Are Most Terrorism Files Forged?
Are Most Terrorism Files Forged?
Posted Nov 30, 2005 12:30 PM PST
Category: COVER-UP/DECEPTIONS
Right after 9-11, the head of the FBI admitted that at least some of the 9-11 hijackers were using skillfully made fake IDs using identities stolen from Arab men.
So, clearly, some documents are forgeries.
Now, consider this; if one has real evidence, one does not need to resort to forgeries. Moreover, if one has real evidence, one does not risk adding forgeries to the pile because the exposure of a forgery casts doubt on the rest of the evidence, even if genuine. So, people who have real evidence don't risk forgery. There is too little to gain and too much to use. Therefore, the presence of a single forged document proves that the party doing the forgery KNOWS there is no real evidence. Hence the answer to the posed question is that the presence of the Niger forgeries and the fake IDs means that ALL of the "terrorists" documents are fakes.
Posted Nov 30, 2005 12:30 PM PST
Category: COVER-UP/DECEPTIONS
Right after 9-11, the head of the FBI admitted that at least some of the 9-11 hijackers were using skillfully made fake IDs using identities stolen from Arab men.
So, clearly, some documents are forgeries.
Now, consider this; if one has real evidence, one does not need to resort to forgeries. Moreover, if one has real evidence, one does not risk adding forgeries to the pile because the exposure of a forgery casts doubt on the rest of the evidence, even if genuine. So, people who have real evidence don't risk forgery. There is too little to gain and too much to use. Therefore, the presence of a single forged document proves that the party doing the forgery KNOWS there is no real evidence. Hence the answer to the posed question is that the presence of the Niger forgeries and the fake IDs means that ALL of the "terrorists" documents are fakes.
Jack Abramoff's Bipartisan Sleaze-The Tempest Cometh
The Tempest Cometh
Jack Abramoff's Bipartisan Sleaze
By JOSHUA FRANK
http://www.counterpunch.org/frank11292005.html
It is far too early to tell what kind of impact it will ultimately have on the Republican establishment, but the Jack Abramoff scandal could well be the most perilous of all the storms developing around Washington. And the cloud forming on the horizon is a dark one indeed.
The most enthralling aspect of this whole controversy is the number of people it potentially involves. From elected officials in Congress to top conservative activists, the Abramoff lobbyist sham could ravage the neocons far worse than the Plame affair. It could also take a top Democrat or two down as well.
The Abramoff saga is more than a single sordid tale of an insider gone wild; it's a vivid narrative of how business is done in Washington. From legal maneuvering to backroom bribes and pay-offs, Abramoff is just a lobbyist in a long line of power hungry DC powerbrokers.
At the heart of the Abramoff inquiry is the work he did for six Indian tribes during the 1990s up until 2004. At question is whether or not Abramoff along with his partner Michael Scanlon bilked at least $80 million from his clients, evaded taxes and violated lobbyist disclosure laws.
There are a handful of politicians currently under scrutiny. Rep. Tom DeLay is the most notable, but now in the hot seat are Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana, Rep. John Doolittle of California and Rep. Robert Ney of Ohio, Republicans all. But on the periphery, and I'm told a potential addition to the aforementioned list in the very near future, could be Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat.
Last week the Associated Press reported that almost three dozen congress people moved to halt the construction of a Louisiana Indian casino while they simultaneously collected large donations from Jack Abramoff and his tribal clients. Senator Harry Reid was one of those elected officials.
Sen. Reid sent a letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton on March 5, 2002, which was also signed by Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. "The next day, the Coushattas issued a $5,000 check to Reid's tax-exempt political group, the Searchlight Leadership Fund. A second Abramoff tribe sent another $5,000 to Reid's group. Reid ultimately received more than $66,000 in Abramoff-related donations between 2001 and 2004," the AP reported.
It was a political tit-for-tat. Reid opposed the construction of the casino and was paid handsomely for his choice. Another Democrat caught up in the legal chaos is former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, who, according to tribal records, wrote Norton on March 1, 2002 about the same matter. Coushattas wrote a $1,000 check to his Senate campaign five days later and handed over $10,000 to his library fund.
We've all heard how DeLay was allegedly flown all over the world on Abramoff's clients' tab, but what we don't hear much about is that two Democratic congressmen, James E. Clyburn of South Carolina and now the vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, along with Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, were flown to the Northern Mariana Islands in the mid-1990s, paid in part by Jack Abramoff. And the list of Democratic culpability in the Abramoff affair goes on.
Odds are looking good that the black cloud engulfing Washington will eventually rain down on both the Republicans and the Democrats.
Joshua Frank is the author of the brand new book, Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, which has just been published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discounted rate at www.brickburner.org. Joshua can be reached at Joshua@brickburner.org.
Jack Abramoff's Bipartisan Sleaze
By JOSHUA FRANK
http://www.counterpunch.org/frank11292005.html
It is far too early to tell what kind of impact it will ultimately have on the Republican establishment, but the Jack Abramoff scandal could well be the most perilous of all the storms developing around Washington. And the cloud forming on the horizon is a dark one indeed.
The most enthralling aspect of this whole controversy is the number of people it potentially involves. From elected officials in Congress to top conservative activists, the Abramoff lobbyist sham could ravage the neocons far worse than the Plame affair. It could also take a top Democrat or two down as well.
The Abramoff saga is more than a single sordid tale of an insider gone wild; it's a vivid narrative of how business is done in Washington. From legal maneuvering to backroom bribes and pay-offs, Abramoff is just a lobbyist in a long line of power hungry DC powerbrokers.
At the heart of the Abramoff inquiry is the work he did for six Indian tribes during the 1990s up until 2004. At question is whether or not Abramoff along with his partner Michael Scanlon bilked at least $80 million from his clients, evaded taxes and violated lobbyist disclosure laws.
There are a handful of politicians currently under scrutiny. Rep. Tom DeLay is the most notable, but now in the hot seat are Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana, Rep. John Doolittle of California and Rep. Robert Ney of Ohio, Republicans all. But on the periphery, and I'm told a potential addition to the aforementioned list in the very near future, could be Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat.
Last week the Associated Press reported that almost three dozen congress people moved to halt the construction of a Louisiana Indian casino while they simultaneously collected large donations from Jack Abramoff and his tribal clients. Senator Harry Reid was one of those elected officials.
Sen. Reid sent a letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton on March 5, 2002, which was also signed by Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. "The next day, the Coushattas issued a $5,000 check to Reid's tax-exempt political group, the Searchlight Leadership Fund. A second Abramoff tribe sent another $5,000 to Reid's group. Reid ultimately received more than $66,000 in Abramoff-related donations between 2001 and 2004," the AP reported.
It was a political tit-for-tat. Reid opposed the construction of the casino and was paid handsomely for his choice. Another Democrat caught up in the legal chaos is former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, who, according to tribal records, wrote Norton on March 1, 2002 about the same matter. Coushattas wrote a $1,000 check to his Senate campaign five days later and handed over $10,000 to his library fund.
We've all heard how DeLay was allegedly flown all over the world on Abramoff's clients' tab, but what we don't hear much about is that two Democratic congressmen, James E. Clyburn of South Carolina and now the vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, along with Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, were flown to the Northern Mariana Islands in the mid-1990s, paid in part by Jack Abramoff. And the list of Democratic culpability in the Abramoff affair goes on.
Odds are looking good that the black cloud engulfing Washington will eventually rain down on both the Republicans and the Democrats.
Joshua Frank is the author of the brand new book, Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, which has just been published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discounted rate at www.brickburner.org. Joshua can be reached at Joshua@brickburner.org.
Good Drugs
Good Drugs
By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet
Posted on November 23, 2005, Printed on November 30, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/28681/
My favorite news bump of the past couple of months started in one of my favorite Canadian cities: Saskatoon.
Researchers there at the University of Saskatchewan demonstrated that marijuana rejuvenates cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain associated with learning and memory. Neuroscientist Xia Zhang and his team injected rats with a superpotent chemical synthesized to resemble a chemical found in a typical puff of pot. And, under the influence of this mega-marijuana, the rats started growing new brain cells.
Please tell me this means that all those annoying PSAs with Rachael Leigh Cook smashing things and talking about "your brain on drugs" will have to be rethought ? or possibly just erased from the nation's cultural memory. Then again, with all those new brain cells we'll be growing, it might be hard for us to forget.
I don't want to jump on the I-told-you-so bandwagon about this, because the U of S study comes with all the usual disclaimers: Rats aren't the same as people; the drug the rats took wasn't exactly the same as marijuana; the drug was administered in ultradoses; don't do this at home; etc. But it's still hard not to dance around a little when I find a good, solid scientific study that doesn't just reiterate all the old propaganda about how pot rots your brain and turns you into a zombie.
There are a lot of weird historical reasons for that propaganda, not the least of which is racism. Alcohol, a drug that is arguably more debilitating and socially destructive than pot, is a European vice. Pot, on the other hand, was used by Natives across the Americas.
It was outlawed in the United States during the 1930s ? roughly around the same time that young Natives were being rounded up and put into orphanages to be "civilized." It was also around this time that black jazz musicians were enjoying the weed as well.
But no group was more closely associated with marijuana than Mexicans. In 1935 a representative from a California antidrug group told the New York Times, "Marihuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration." Legislators chose to use the Mexican word for the drug to intensify this connection. And pot regulation started in states near the Mexican border ? where it was being imported at a rapid clip ? and culminated in the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, a federal law that made nearly all pot trafficking a crime.
None of the legislation that prohibited marijuana sales was motivated by health concerns. In fact, the hearings leading up to the 1937 law dealt very little with "this is your brain"-style issues: The main evidence used to demonstrate the ill effects of marijuana (other than its connection with Mexicans) was a few sensationalist articles from Hearst newspapers about how pot turned upstanding citizens into criminals.
After the Marihuana Tax Act went into effect, law enforcement gradually cracked down on all the US citizens trying frantically to grow their hippocampi. But people interested in bringing scientific fact into this mystified kerfuffle were also there trying to remind everyone that drugs weren't the problem.
I was reminded of this quite forcefully the other day when I picked up a first edition of Aldous Huxley's 1946 monograph Science, Liberty, and Peace on the street in New York City's East Village. In it, Huxley argues that the government uses science to keep its citizens in line, thus perverting science from its aim of enlightenment. Huxley is also the author of another famous monograph, The Doors of Perception, a very eloquent defense of mescaline and other banned drugs as tools for mind expansion. As his novel Brave New World makes clear, Huxley was well aware of the negative uses to which drugs could be put, but he still argued that people should be free to try them, because they might also have educational properties nobody understood yet.
The guys with stoned rats over at the U of S are scientists in the Huxley tradition: They refuse to be cowed by propaganda that prevents us from discovering the possible benefits of drugs. I don't know about you, but I'm feeling kind of high on science right now.
Annalee Newitz (ratsmoker@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who once got her cat stoned but didn't notice any intelligence-enhancing side effects.
By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet
Posted on November 23, 2005, Printed on November 30, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/28681/
My favorite news bump of the past couple of months started in one of my favorite Canadian cities: Saskatoon.
Researchers there at the University of Saskatchewan demonstrated that marijuana rejuvenates cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain associated with learning and memory. Neuroscientist Xia Zhang and his team injected rats with a superpotent chemical synthesized to resemble a chemical found in a typical puff of pot. And, under the influence of this mega-marijuana, the rats started growing new brain cells.
Please tell me this means that all those annoying PSAs with Rachael Leigh Cook smashing things and talking about "your brain on drugs" will have to be rethought ? or possibly just erased from the nation's cultural memory. Then again, with all those new brain cells we'll be growing, it might be hard for us to forget.
I don't want to jump on the I-told-you-so bandwagon about this, because the U of S study comes with all the usual disclaimers: Rats aren't the same as people; the drug the rats took wasn't exactly the same as marijuana; the drug was administered in ultradoses; don't do this at home; etc. But it's still hard not to dance around a little when I find a good, solid scientific study that doesn't just reiterate all the old propaganda about how pot rots your brain and turns you into a zombie.
There are a lot of weird historical reasons for that propaganda, not the least of which is racism. Alcohol, a drug that is arguably more debilitating and socially destructive than pot, is a European vice. Pot, on the other hand, was used by Natives across the Americas.
It was outlawed in the United States during the 1930s ? roughly around the same time that young Natives were being rounded up and put into orphanages to be "civilized." It was also around this time that black jazz musicians were enjoying the weed as well.
But no group was more closely associated with marijuana than Mexicans. In 1935 a representative from a California antidrug group told the New York Times, "Marihuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration." Legislators chose to use the Mexican word for the drug to intensify this connection. And pot regulation started in states near the Mexican border ? where it was being imported at a rapid clip ? and culminated in the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, a federal law that made nearly all pot trafficking a crime.
None of the legislation that prohibited marijuana sales was motivated by health concerns. In fact, the hearings leading up to the 1937 law dealt very little with "this is your brain"-style issues: The main evidence used to demonstrate the ill effects of marijuana (other than its connection with Mexicans) was a few sensationalist articles from Hearst newspapers about how pot turned upstanding citizens into criminals.
After the Marihuana Tax Act went into effect, law enforcement gradually cracked down on all the US citizens trying frantically to grow their hippocampi. But people interested in bringing scientific fact into this mystified kerfuffle were also there trying to remind everyone that drugs weren't the problem.
I was reminded of this quite forcefully the other day when I picked up a first edition of Aldous Huxley's 1946 monograph Science, Liberty, and Peace on the street in New York City's East Village. In it, Huxley argues that the government uses science to keep its citizens in line, thus perverting science from its aim of enlightenment. Huxley is also the author of another famous monograph, The Doors of Perception, a very eloquent defense of mescaline and other banned drugs as tools for mind expansion. As his novel Brave New World makes clear, Huxley was well aware of the negative uses to which drugs could be put, but he still argued that people should be free to try them, because they might also have educational properties nobody understood yet.
The guys with stoned rats over at the U of S are scientists in the Huxley tradition: They refuse to be cowed by propaganda that prevents us from discovering the possible benefits of drugs. I don't know about you, but I'm feeling kind of high on science right now.
Annalee Newitz (ratsmoker@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who once got her cat stoned but didn't notice any intelligence-enhancing side effects.
Bush's misleading statements on Iraq
From Capitol Hill Blue
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7708.shtml
Bush Leagues
Bush's misleading statements on Iraq
By BILL STRAUB
Nov 27, 2005, 02:31
President Bush is engaged in an increasingly bitter exchange with critics who maintain the White House intentionally misled the public to generate support for the war in Iraq.
Evidently most people seem to believe those claims -- 64 percent of those questioned in the most recent Harris Interactive Poll believe the administration "generally misleads the public on current issues."
The administration has acknowledged that the intelligence used to advance the argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was faulty. But critics say their claims that Bush is providing misleading data is based on other declarations:
-- On Oct. 7, 2002, during a major speech in Cincinnati, the president said Iraq was involved in training al Qaeda members to make bombs and providing advice on the use of poisons and deadly gases. It subsequently was learned through declassified Defense Intelligence Agency documents that the sole source for that claim, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a top al Qaeda operative, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" when he offered that information. That report was issued in February 2002 _ long before Bush included the allegation in his speech.
-- In that same Cincinnati presentation, the president said Iraq maintained a "growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles" that could be used in missions targeting the United States. But the U.S. Air Force, in a National Intelligence Estimate released to the White House just before Bush's appearance, declared that Iraq was developing the UAVs "primarily for reconnaissance rather than delivery platforms."
-- In his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, Bush cited intelligence sources when he declared Iraq "attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons." Three months earlier, the Office of Intelligence within the Department of Energy determined that the aluminum tubes were not intended for Iraq's nuclear program.
-- Vice President Cheney, during a Dec. 9, 2001, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," said it was "pretty well confirmed" that Mohammed Atta, the ring-leader of the 9/11 hijackers, met with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi government official, in Prague, Czech Republic, on April 8, 2001, providing evidence of a link between the terrorist group and the Baghdad government. Neither the CIA nor the FBI believes Atta left the United States that April.
Then there is the "yellow cake" controversy. In that 2003 State of the Union address, Bush noted the British government "has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Before the speech, the CIA warned the administration on three different occasions that the claim shouldn't be cited because it could not be confirmed. The State Department, in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, declared that the uranium claim was "highly dubious."
That open question led to the decision to send Ambassador Joseph Wilson to the Sudan to determine the veracity of the claim. Wilson reported it was unlikely that Iraq had made any purchase and subsequently wrote a piece for The New York Times criticizing the administration for continuing to circulate the claim.
In an apparent effort to discredit Wilson, it was revealed that his wife, Valerie, was a CIA agent. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate the matter, leading to the indictment of Cheney's now-former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice.
(Contact Bill Straub at StraubB(at)shns.com)
� Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7708.shtml
Bush Leagues
Bush's misleading statements on Iraq
By BILL STRAUB
Nov 27, 2005, 02:31
President Bush is engaged in an increasingly bitter exchange with critics who maintain the White House intentionally misled the public to generate support for the war in Iraq.
Evidently most people seem to believe those claims -- 64 percent of those questioned in the most recent Harris Interactive Poll believe the administration "generally misleads the public on current issues."
The administration has acknowledged that the intelligence used to advance the argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was faulty. But critics say their claims that Bush is providing misleading data is based on other declarations:
-- On Oct. 7, 2002, during a major speech in Cincinnati, the president said Iraq was involved in training al Qaeda members to make bombs and providing advice on the use of poisons and deadly gases. It subsequently was learned through declassified Defense Intelligence Agency documents that the sole source for that claim, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a top al Qaeda operative, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" when he offered that information. That report was issued in February 2002 _ long before Bush included the allegation in his speech.
-- In that same Cincinnati presentation, the president said Iraq maintained a "growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles" that could be used in missions targeting the United States. But the U.S. Air Force, in a National Intelligence Estimate released to the White House just before Bush's appearance, declared that Iraq was developing the UAVs "primarily for reconnaissance rather than delivery platforms."
-- In his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, Bush cited intelligence sources when he declared Iraq "attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons." Three months earlier, the Office of Intelligence within the Department of Energy determined that the aluminum tubes were not intended for Iraq's nuclear program.
-- Vice President Cheney, during a Dec. 9, 2001, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," said it was "pretty well confirmed" that Mohammed Atta, the ring-leader of the 9/11 hijackers, met with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi government official, in Prague, Czech Republic, on April 8, 2001, providing evidence of a link between the terrorist group and the Baghdad government. Neither the CIA nor the FBI believes Atta left the United States that April.
Then there is the "yellow cake" controversy. In that 2003 State of the Union address, Bush noted the British government "has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Before the speech, the CIA warned the administration on three different occasions that the claim shouldn't be cited because it could not be confirmed. The State Department, in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, declared that the uranium claim was "highly dubious."
That open question led to the decision to send Ambassador Joseph Wilson to the Sudan to determine the veracity of the claim. Wilson reported it was unlikely that Iraq had made any purchase and subsequently wrote a piece for The New York Times criticizing the administration for continuing to circulate the claim.
In an apparent effort to discredit Wilson, it was revealed that his wife, Valerie, was a CIA agent. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate the matter, leading to the indictment of Cheney's now-former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice.
(Contact Bill Straub at StraubB(at)shns.com)
� Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue
US says Venezuela apologized for incident with US lawmakers - Forbes.com
US says Venezuela apologized for incident with US lawmakers - Forbes.com
WASHINGTON (AFX) - The United States says that Venezuela has apologized for not allowing a US congressional delegation to enter the country, but Caracas denies that assertion.
'I'm not sure what version of events has come out from the Venezuelan government but I can tell you that they have apologized for what happened,' State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, according to Agence France-Presse.
'So I'm not sure what they said prior to the apology but they have apologized for what happened.'
Hours earlier, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry denied the US delegation had been denied entry into the country.
According to a report received by the State Department, McCormack said, 'the delegation landed in Venezuela and they were not allowed to disembark according to the procedures that had been already agreed with under the Venezuelan government.'
He said American diplomats sought to fix the situation on Monday with the Venezuelan government, but were unable to, and after an hour and a half, the US delegation decided to leave.
The delegation was led by Republican Representative Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Committee on International Relations.
The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry said the decision was made exclusively by members of the US delegation and the US Embassy.
pb/mk/jjc/dk
WASHINGTON (AFX) - The United States says that Venezuela has apologized for not allowing a US congressional delegation to enter the country, but Caracas denies that assertion.
'I'm not sure what version of events has come out from the Venezuelan government but I can tell you that they have apologized for what happened,' State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, according to Agence France-Presse.
'So I'm not sure what they said prior to the apology but they have apologized for what happened.'
Hours earlier, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry denied the US delegation had been denied entry into the country.
According to a report received by the State Department, McCormack said, 'the delegation landed in Venezuela and they were not allowed to disembark according to the procedures that had been already agreed with under the Venezuelan government.'
He said American diplomats sought to fix the situation on Monday with the Venezuelan government, but were unable to, and after an hour and a half, the US delegation decided to leave.
The delegation was led by Republican Representative Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Committee on International Relations.
The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry said the decision was made exclusively by members of the US delegation and the US Embassy.
pb/mk/jjc/dk
Mystery Train
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/112905Q.shtml
Mystery Train
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 29 November 2005
The Abu Ghraib images were bad enough.
There they were, fresh-faced American soldiers presiding over the systematic torture and humiliation of Iraqis with big smiles and thumbs up. There was the Iraqi corpse, wrapped in a bag and festooned with blood, and a toothsome female American soldier grinning like a kid at Christmas as she leaned over the body. There was the man menaced by a dog being restrained on a leash by an American soldier, and there was the same man in a subsequent photo with a huge, bloody chunk ripped out of his leg.
Now we have these videos, these so-called Aegis videos , allegedly showing contractors in Iraq driving the road between Baghdad and the airport. In the video, men speaking with Irish or Scottish accents use an assault rifle to indiscriminately blast other cars on the road. The video shows cars peppered with bullets careening to and fro, crashing into each other and rolling into the trees. In the background, Elvis Presley can be heard singing "Mystery Train."
The UK Telegraph, reporting on the video, states, "The video, which first appeared on a website that has been linked unofficially to Aegis Defence Services, contained four separate clips, in which security guards open fire with automatic rifles at civilian cars. All of the shooting incidents apparently took place on 'route Irish', a road that links the airport to Baghdad."
"The video first appeared on the website www.aegisIraq.co.uk," continued the Telegraph. "The website states: 'This site does not belong to Aegis Defence Ltd, it belongs to the men on the ground who are the heart and soul of the company.' The clips have been removed."
The road where these videotaped attacks took place, continued the Telegraph report, "has acquired the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous in the world because of the number of suicide attacks and ambushes carried out by insurgents against coalition troops. In one four- month period earlier this year it was the scene of 150 attacks."
That last paragraph begs the obvious question: who exactly is doing the attacking along route Irish, and elsewhere in Iraq for that matter? The fact that this unspeakable act was captured on video, soundtrack and all, does not in any way preclude the probability that this was not the first time a non- Iraqi decided to pass the time by slaughtering innocent people.
An investigation into the substance of this video is onging.
Indeed, there is a substantial body of evidence to suggest that private security contractors in Iraq (who can simply be called mercenaries once we dispense with the euphemisms), who operate beyond any rules or controls, have often engaged in attacks upon Iraqi civilians. One such body of evidence is, in fact, a body.
His name was Ted Westhusing, and he was a colonel in the US Army. A scholar of military ethics and a full professor at West Point, Westhusing volunteered to serve in Iraq in 2004 because he believed the experience would help him teach his students the meaning of honor in uniform. Once in Iraq, he was tasked to oversee a private security company from Virginia called USIS, which had received a $79 million contract to train Iraqi police in special operations.
As the months passed, Westhusing's mood darkened. He received reports that USIS contractors and their Iraqi trainees were killing Iraqi civilians, and that USIS was ripping off the US government by deliberately shorting the number of trainees in the fold so as to increase profits. Westhusing the ethicist became despondent, finding no honor whatsoever in his Iraq service.
One day in June, Westhusing's body was found in a trailer with a bullet wound to the head. His service pistol was found beside him, along with a note. "I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," the note read. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more."
Westhusing's body was flown home to the United States, where it was greeted by his wife, Michelle, and an unidentified lieutenant colonel who had befriended Westhusing at West Point. The lieutenant colonel asked Michelle what had happened to her husband. She replied, simply, "Iraq."
An Army investigation into the allegations raised against USIS is ongoing.
Highly-paid mercenaries are not the only ones who are apparently indiscriminately killing Iraqi civilians. The New York Times editorial board, in an article titled 'Shake and Bake,' published on Tuesday, felt the need to scold the US military for using horrific chemical weapons in battle - weapons that reportedly have caused serious civilian casualties.
"White phosphorus, which dates to World War II, should have been banned generations ago," wrote the Times. "Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an enemy's positions. It also rains balls of flaming chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for hours inside a human body. But white phosphorus has made an ugly comeback. Italian television reported that American forces used it in Fallujah last year against insurgents."
"At first," continued the Times, "the Pentagon said the chemical had been used only to illuminate the battlefield, but had to backpedal when it turned out that one of the Army's own publications talked about using white phosphorus against insurgent positions, a practice well known enough to have one of those unsettling military nicknames: 'shake and bake.' The Pentagon says white phosphorus was never aimed at civilians, but there are lingering reports of civilian victims. The military can't say whether the reports are true and does not intend to investigate them, a decision we find difficult to comprehend."
The charges against Aegis have not been proven. The charges against USIS have not been proven. The charge that the US military aimed white phosphorous chemical weapons at civilians has not been proven. In each instance, however, the charges are supported by substantial evidence.
Journalist Seymour Hersh, in a recent New Yorker article titled 'Up In the Air,' described the administration's view of the spiraling madness taking place in Iraq. He recounts the comments of a former defense official who served in Bush's first term. According to Hersh, "'The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,'" the former defense official said. "'He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage "People may suffer and die, but the Church advances."'"
"He said that the President had become more detached," continued Hersh, "leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney." "'They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,'" the former defense official said. Bush's public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. "'Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,'" the former official said, "'but Bush has no idea.'"
We are all prisoners on this mystery train. God only knows where it will lead.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence .
Mystery Train
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 29 November 2005
The Abu Ghraib images were bad enough.
There they were, fresh-faced American soldiers presiding over the systematic torture and humiliation of Iraqis with big smiles and thumbs up. There was the Iraqi corpse, wrapped in a bag and festooned with blood, and a toothsome female American soldier grinning like a kid at Christmas as she leaned over the body. There was the man menaced by a dog being restrained on a leash by an American soldier, and there was the same man in a subsequent photo with a huge, bloody chunk ripped out of his leg.
Now we have these videos, these so-called Aegis videos , allegedly showing contractors in Iraq driving the road between Baghdad and the airport. In the video, men speaking with Irish or Scottish accents use an assault rifle to indiscriminately blast other cars on the road. The video shows cars peppered with bullets careening to and fro, crashing into each other and rolling into the trees. In the background, Elvis Presley can be heard singing "Mystery Train."
The UK Telegraph, reporting on the video, states, "The video, which first appeared on a website that has been linked unofficially to Aegis Defence Services, contained four separate clips, in which security guards open fire with automatic rifles at civilian cars. All of the shooting incidents apparently took place on 'route Irish', a road that links the airport to Baghdad."
"The video first appeared on the website www.aegisIraq.co.uk," continued the Telegraph. "The website states: 'This site does not belong to Aegis Defence Ltd, it belongs to the men on the ground who are the heart and soul of the company.' The clips have been removed."
The road where these videotaped attacks took place, continued the Telegraph report, "has acquired the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous in the world because of the number of suicide attacks and ambushes carried out by insurgents against coalition troops. In one four- month period earlier this year it was the scene of 150 attacks."
That last paragraph begs the obvious question: who exactly is doing the attacking along route Irish, and elsewhere in Iraq for that matter? The fact that this unspeakable act was captured on video, soundtrack and all, does not in any way preclude the probability that this was not the first time a non- Iraqi decided to pass the time by slaughtering innocent people.
An investigation into the substance of this video is onging.
Indeed, there is a substantial body of evidence to suggest that private security contractors in Iraq (who can simply be called mercenaries once we dispense with the euphemisms), who operate beyond any rules or controls, have often engaged in attacks upon Iraqi civilians. One such body of evidence is, in fact, a body.
His name was Ted Westhusing, and he was a colonel in the US Army. A scholar of military ethics and a full professor at West Point, Westhusing volunteered to serve in Iraq in 2004 because he believed the experience would help him teach his students the meaning of honor in uniform. Once in Iraq, he was tasked to oversee a private security company from Virginia called USIS, which had received a $79 million contract to train Iraqi police in special operations.
As the months passed, Westhusing's mood darkened. He received reports that USIS contractors and their Iraqi trainees were killing Iraqi civilians, and that USIS was ripping off the US government by deliberately shorting the number of trainees in the fold so as to increase profits. Westhusing the ethicist became despondent, finding no honor whatsoever in his Iraq service.
One day in June, Westhusing's body was found in a trailer with a bullet wound to the head. His service pistol was found beside him, along with a note. "I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," the note read. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more."
Westhusing's body was flown home to the United States, where it was greeted by his wife, Michelle, and an unidentified lieutenant colonel who had befriended Westhusing at West Point. The lieutenant colonel asked Michelle what had happened to her husband. She replied, simply, "Iraq."
An Army investigation into the allegations raised against USIS is ongoing.
Highly-paid mercenaries are not the only ones who are apparently indiscriminately killing Iraqi civilians. The New York Times editorial board, in an article titled 'Shake and Bake,' published on Tuesday, felt the need to scold the US military for using horrific chemical weapons in battle - weapons that reportedly have caused serious civilian casualties.
"White phosphorus, which dates to World War II, should have been banned generations ago," wrote the Times. "Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an enemy's positions. It also rains balls of flaming chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for hours inside a human body. But white phosphorus has made an ugly comeback. Italian television reported that American forces used it in Fallujah last year against insurgents."
"At first," continued the Times, "the Pentagon said the chemical had been used only to illuminate the battlefield, but had to backpedal when it turned out that one of the Army's own publications talked about using white phosphorus against insurgent positions, a practice well known enough to have one of those unsettling military nicknames: 'shake and bake.' The Pentagon says white phosphorus was never aimed at civilians, but there are lingering reports of civilian victims. The military can't say whether the reports are true and does not intend to investigate them, a decision we find difficult to comprehend."
The charges against Aegis have not been proven. The charges against USIS have not been proven. The charge that the US military aimed white phosphorous chemical weapons at civilians has not been proven. In each instance, however, the charges are supported by substantial evidence.
Journalist Seymour Hersh, in a recent New Yorker article titled 'Up In the Air,' described the administration's view of the spiraling madness taking place in Iraq. He recounts the comments of a former defense official who served in Bush's first term. According to Hersh, "'The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,'" the former defense official said. "'He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage "People may suffer and die, but the Church advances."'"
"He said that the President had become more detached," continued Hersh, "leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney." "'They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,'" the former defense official said. Bush's public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. "'Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,'" the former official said, "'but Bush has no idea.'"
We are all prisoners on this mystery train. God only knows where it will lead.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence .
Cheney 'may be guilty of war crime'
Cheney 'may be guilty of war crime'
� Vice-president accused of backing torture
� Claims on BBC by former insider add to Bush's woes
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday November 30, 2005
Guardian
Vice-president Dick Cheney's burden on the Bush administration grew heavier yesterday after a former senior US state department official said he could be guilty of a war crime over the abuse of prisoners.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, singled out Mr Cheney in a wide-ranging political assault on the BBC's Today programme.
Mr Wilkerson said that in an internal administration debate over whether to abide by the Geneva conventions in the treatment of detainees, Mr Cheney led the argument "that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions".
Asked whether the vice-president was guilty of a war crime, Mr Wilkerson replied: "Well, that's an interesting question - it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is ... an international crime as well." In the context of other remarks it appeared he was using the word "terror" to apply to the systematic abuse of prisoners.
The Washington Post last month called Mr Cheney the "vice-president for torture" for his demand that the CIA be exempted from a ban on "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of detainees.
Mr Wilkerson, a former army colonel, also said he had seen increasing evidence that the White House had manipulated pre-war intelligence on Iraq to make its case for the invasion. He said: "You begin to wonder was this intelligence spun? Was it politicised? Was it cherry-picked? Did, in fact, the American people get fooled? I am beginning to have my concerns."
Mr Cheney has been under fire for his role in assembling evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Mr Wilkerson told the Associated Press that the vice-president must have sincerely believed Iraq could be a spawning ground for terrorism because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard".
Such charges have kept the Bush administration on the defensive for several months. Mr Bush yesterday repeated his earlier assertion that the US "does not torture and that's important for people around the world to realise". He is also due to make the first of a series of speeches today, outlining his plan to defeat the insurgency and pave the way for US withdrawal. The White House will also publish a declassified version of its war plan.
But it has now emerged that two justice department memos listing permissible interrogation methods have been kept secret by the White House, even from the Senate intelligence committee. The New Yorker recently quoted a source who had seen a memo as calling it "breathtaking".
"The document dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the president can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit," the magazine reported.
One technique allegedly used by the CIA in questioning suspects is "waterboarding" (strapping a detainee to a board and submerging it until the prisoner believes he or she is drowning). The White House is accused of defining "torture" so narrowly as to exclude such methods. But James Ross, a legal expert at Human Rights Watch said such a narrow definition was at odds with international norms.
"Waterboarding is clearly a form of torture. It has been used since the Inquisition. It was a well-known torture technique in Latin America," Mr Ross said.
Human Rights Watch this year called for a special counsel to investigate any US officials - no matter their rank or position - who took part in, "ordered, or had command responsibility for war crimes or torture, or other prohibited ill-treatment against detainees in US custody".
The report focused on the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, for his alleged command responsibility for abuses at Abu Ghraib, but Mr Wilkerson argued Mr Cheney was ultimately responsible.
The US is a signatory to the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture, which bans inflicting "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental". Such practices are also a crime under US federal law.
� Vice-president accused of backing torture
� Claims on BBC by former insider add to Bush's woes
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday November 30, 2005
Guardian
Vice-president Dick Cheney's burden on the Bush administration grew heavier yesterday after a former senior US state department official said he could be guilty of a war crime over the abuse of prisoners.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, singled out Mr Cheney in a wide-ranging political assault on the BBC's Today programme.
Mr Wilkerson said that in an internal administration debate over whether to abide by the Geneva conventions in the treatment of detainees, Mr Cheney led the argument "that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions".
Asked whether the vice-president was guilty of a war crime, Mr Wilkerson replied: "Well, that's an interesting question - it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is ... an international crime as well." In the context of other remarks it appeared he was using the word "terror" to apply to the systematic abuse of prisoners.
The Washington Post last month called Mr Cheney the "vice-president for torture" for his demand that the CIA be exempted from a ban on "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of detainees.
Mr Wilkerson, a former army colonel, also said he had seen increasing evidence that the White House had manipulated pre-war intelligence on Iraq to make its case for the invasion. He said: "You begin to wonder was this intelligence spun? Was it politicised? Was it cherry-picked? Did, in fact, the American people get fooled? I am beginning to have my concerns."
Mr Cheney has been under fire for his role in assembling evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Mr Wilkerson told the Associated Press that the vice-president must have sincerely believed Iraq could be a spawning ground for terrorism because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard".
Such charges have kept the Bush administration on the defensive for several months. Mr Bush yesterday repeated his earlier assertion that the US "does not torture and that's important for people around the world to realise". He is also due to make the first of a series of speeches today, outlining his plan to defeat the insurgency and pave the way for US withdrawal. The White House will also publish a declassified version of its war plan.
But it has now emerged that two justice department memos listing permissible interrogation methods have been kept secret by the White House, even from the Senate intelligence committee. The New Yorker recently quoted a source who had seen a memo as calling it "breathtaking".
"The document dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the president can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit," the magazine reported.
One technique allegedly used by the CIA in questioning suspects is "waterboarding" (strapping a detainee to a board and submerging it until the prisoner believes he or she is drowning). The White House is accused of defining "torture" so narrowly as to exclude such methods. But James Ross, a legal expert at Human Rights Watch said such a narrow definition was at odds with international norms.
"Waterboarding is clearly a form of torture. It has been used since the Inquisition. It was a well-known torture technique in Latin America," Mr Ross said.
Human Rights Watch this year called for a special counsel to investigate any US officials - no matter their rank or position - who took part in, "ordered, or had command responsibility for war crimes or torture, or other prohibited ill-treatment against detainees in US custody".
The report focused on the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, for his alleged command responsibility for abuses at Abu Ghraib, but Mr Wilkerson argued Mr Cheney was ultimately responsible.
The US is a signatory to the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture, which bans inflicting "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental". Such practices are also a crime under US federal law.
Is the UN case against Syria about to collapse?
Is the UN case against Syria about to collapse?
http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1841934,00.html
'I was paid to blame Syria'
28/11/2005 15:46 - (SA)
Beirut - A man has claimed on Syrian state TV that he was bribed to
accuse top Syrian officials of the murder of Rafiq Hariri in his
testimony to the United Nations commission into the former Lebanese
premier's assassination.
Husam Taher Husam, a former conscript in the Syrian army, alleged in a
75-minute interview on Sunday night that Saad Hariri, the son of the
slain Hariri, met him several months ago and offered him $1.3m to
testify against top Syrian officials.
The spokesperson for the Syrian inquiry into Hariri's murder, Ibrahim
Daraji, said on Monday that if Husam is the unidentified key witness
quoted in the UN commission's interim report, then the United Nations'
case "has completely collapsed."
Daraji spoke at a press conference in Damascus on Monday at which
Husam reiterated the allegations he had made on Syrian television the
night before.
Syria criticised UN report
Husam told the television that UN officials told him what to say when
he gave evidence to the UN commission, in particular that he was
"close to" Brigadier General Assef Shawkat, the chief of Syrian
military intelligence and brother-in-law of Syria's president, who was
named in the commission's interim report last month.
"But I've never seen him in my whole life," Husam said of Shawkat in
the television interview.
It was not possibly to reach Saad Hariri for a response on Monday as
he was travelling in South America. News bulletins on Hariri's own
Future TV station did not refer to Husam's claims. The UN commission
rarely responds to media reports about the investigation.
Husam's allegations came days before five senior Syrian officials were
due to appear before the UN commission in Vienna. The officials, who
have not been named either by the commission or Syria, will be
questioned in the UN headquarters in the Austrian capital as part of
an agreement reached after more than two weeks of negotiations over
where and how their evidence would be taken.
In its interim report, the commission implicated the Syrian and
Lebanese intelligence services in the Beirut bombing that killed
Hariri and 20 others on February 14. Lebanon welcomed the report, but
Syria rejected it as politicised and unfounded on evidence. Syrian
officials have for weeks tried to discredit the UN investigation as
biased against Syria.
Previously, another Syrian, Mohammed Zuhair Siddiq, gave evidence to
the commission but was later discredited. At the commission's
recommendation, he was arrested in France in October and extradited to
Lebanon where he is being held as a suspect in the murder.
Hariri's assassination, which many Lebanese blame on Syria, was the
catalyst for mass anti-Syrian street protests and intensified
international pressure that forced Syria to withdraw its army from
Lebanon, ending nearly three decades of domination.
http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1841934,00.html
'I was paid to blame Syria'
28/11/2005 15:46 - (SA)
Beirut - A man has claimed on Syrian state TV that he was bribed to
accuse top Syrian officials of the murder of Rafiq Hariri in his
testimony to the United Nations commission into the former Lebanese
premier's assassination.
Husam Taher Husam, a former conscript in the Syrian army, alleged in a
75-minute interview on Sunday night that Saad Hariri, the son of the
slain Hariri, met him several months ago and offered him $1.3m to
testify against top Syrian officials.
The spokesperson for the Syrian inquiry into Hariri's murder, Ibrahim
Daraji, said on Monday that if Husam is the unidentified key witness
quoted in the UN commission's interim report, then the United Nations'
case "has completely collapsed."
Daraji spoke at a press conference in Damascus on Monday at which
Husam reiterated the allegations he had made on Syrian television the
night before.
Syria criticised UN report
Husam told the television that UN officials told him what to say when
he gave evidence to the UN commission, in particular that he was
"close to" Brigadier General Assef Shawkat, the chief of Syrian
military intelligence and brother-in-law of Syria's president, who was
named in the commission's interim report last month.
"But I've never seen him in my whole life," Husam said of Shawkat in
the television interview.
It was not possibly to reach Saad Hariri for a response on Monday as
he was travelling in South America. News bulletins on Hariri's own
Future TV station did not refer to Husam's claims. The UN commission
rarely responds to media reports about the investigation.
Husam's allegations came days before five senior Syrian officials were
due to appear before the UN commission in Vienna. The officials, who
have not been named either by the commission or Syria, will be
questioned in the UN headquarters in the Austrian capital as part of
an agreement reached after more than two weeks of negotiations over
where and how their evidence would be taken.
In its interim report, the commission implicated the Syrian and
Lebanese intelligence services in the Beirut bombing that killed
Hariri and 20 others on February 14. Lebanon welcomed the report, but
Syria rejected it as politicised and unfounded on evidence. Syrian
officials have for weeks tried to discredit the UN investigation as
biased against Syria.
Previously, another Syrian, Mohammed Zuhair Siddiq, gave evidence to
the commission but was later discredited. At the commission's
recommendation, he was arrested in France in October and extradited to
Lebanon where he is being held as a suspect in the murder.
Hariri's assassination, which many Lebanese blame on Syria, was the
catalyst for mass anti-Syrian street protests and intensified
international pressure that forced Syria to withdraw its army from
Lebanon, ending nearly three decades of domination.
A PBS documentary names U.S. torture commanders
On Rumsfeld's Watch
A PBS documentary names U.S. torture commanders
by Nat Hentoff
November 7th, 2005 2:28 PM http://villagevoice.com/news/0545,hentoff,69754,6.html
Laws, like the spiders' webs, catch the small flies and let the large ones go free. ? Balzac La Maison Nucingen
At the end of the day, you can't become your enemy in the name of defeating your enemy.? Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a former Air Force lawyer, in "The Torture Question," Frontline
In the time of Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly at CBS TV, the other television networks also had penetrating documentary units; but now only public television's Frontline equals Murrow and Friendly at their factually unsparing best. A formidable case in point was the October 18 airing of "The Torture Question," produced, directed, and written by Michael Kirk.
It should be shown to the members and staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, with Donald Rumsfeld as an invited guest?but it won't be. (He refused to be interviewed by Frontline.)
Like Rumsfeld, George W. Bush echoes the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, in assuring us that the riveting photographs in the cell blocks at Abu Ghraib did not reflect "a widespread problem"?just them bad apples. But "The Torture Question" declares?and proves?that:
"A close examination of the evidence behind 12 official investigations . . . FBI internal e-mails . . . and dozens of interviews by Frontline tells a fuller story of what happened at Abu Ghraib and of policies, practices, and patterns that bring the torture question to the highest levels of the American government."
Donald Rumsfeld and the White House, determined to get "actionable intelligence" from the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and our other detention legal holes, "wanted 'Geneva' [the Geneva Conventions] out of the way."
Early in the program, Frontline illuminates the repellent complicity of the "small circle of lawyers who surrounded the president" and "together would create a legal theory that would permit the United States to act unilaterally in defining the "rules of war"?and justifying the unprecedented powers to be given to George W. Bush?including the authorization of torture.
These lawyers have themselves not been brought to justice or to any formal inquiry into their culpability. As I've noted in previous columns, John Yoo, then in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, often on television and lecturing at other campuses.
Another participant in the famous "torture memos," Jay S. Bybee, then an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, has been elevated to a federal judgeship at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And Jack Goldsmith, formerly of the Office of Legal Counsel, has become a law professor at Harvard.
Above them in the circle around the president were lawyers highlighted by Frontlin e: Alberto Gonzales, then the president's chief legal counsel; David Addington, the vice president's top lawyer and now chief of staff; and Wil liam Haynes, Rumsfeld's civilian counsel at the Pentagon and later nominated by the president to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
"The Torture Question" points to one of many results of these lawyers' providing the president with the power to bypass both international and our own laws. The testimony is from an FBI agent at Guant�namo:
"I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more." This, of course, was on Donald Rumsfeld's watch.
The American Civil Liberties Union has released copies of e-mails to FBI director Robert Mueller from appalled FBI agents protesting the unlawful, inhumane interrogations they had witnessed. Director Mueller himself has never joined their protests nor acknowledged any acts of torture at Abu Ghraib, Guant�namo, or any of our other "detention" facilities.
In The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge University Press), edited by Karen J. Greenberg, director of NYU law school's Center of Law and Security, NYU law professor Burt Neuborne asks: "Is there something that we are not doing in American law schools that is allowing the best and the brightest of our profession to drift into a situation where they think that all they have to do is find an argument that will justify their client's goal?"
There are all kinds of symposia and conferences at American law schools, and I wonder if there have been any focused on this circle of highly skilled lawyers around the president who provided such encouragement to Donald Rumsfeld and his generals (and lesser officers in the field) to get "actionable intelligence" from prisoners by any means necessary.
Has the American Bar Association, which vigorously criticized some of Rumsfeld's and the president's twisting of the rule of law, looked into the legal ethics of this so far charmed circle of alumni attorneys of the Justice and Defense departments?
The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the nation's premier bar association?
and Scott Horton, the chair of its Committee of International Law?certainly have. Maybe they can offer their services to the ABA.
Frontline has given the nation much to think about. For further instance, from a soldier on the ground: "Most of the abuses around Iraq are not photographed . . .
so they'll never get any outrage out of it. And this makes it even harsher, because around Iraq, in the back of a Humvee or in a shipping container . . . there's no one looking over your shoulder, so you can do anything you want."
And, from former Army interrogator Anthony Lagouranis: "Now it's all over Iraq . . . the infantry units are torturing people in their homes. They were using things like burns. They would smash people's feet with the back of an ax head. They would break bones, ribs, you know . . . that was serious stuff."
As John McCain said, speaking of the terrorist enemy, "This isn't about who they are. This is about who we are." Hail to the chief!
A PBS documentary names U.S. torture commanders
by Nat Hentoff
November 7th, 2005 2:28 PM http://villagevoice.com/news/0545,hentoff,69754,6.html
Laws, like the spiders' webs, catch the small flies and let the large ones go free. ? Balzac La Maison Nucingen
At the end of the day, you can't become your enemy in the name of defeating your enemy.? Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a former Air Force lawyer, in "The Torture Question," Frontline
In the time of Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly at CBS TV, the other television networks also had penetrating documentary units; but now only public television's Frontline equals Murrow and Friendly at their factually unsparing best. A formidable case in point was the October 18 airing of "The Torture Question," produced, directed, and written by Michael Kirk.
It should be shown to the members and staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, with Donald Rumsfeld as an invited guest?but it won't be. (He refused to be interviewed by Frontline.)
Like Rumsfeld, George W. Bush echoes the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, in assuring us that the riveting photographs in the cell blocks at Abu Ghraib did not reflect "a widespread problem"?just them bad apples. But "The Torture Question" declares?and proves?that:
"A close examination of the evidence behind 12 official investigations . . . FBI internal e-mails . . . and dozens of interviews by Frontline tells a fuller story of what happened at Abu Ghraib and of policies, practices, and patterns that bring the torture question to the highest levels of the American government."
Donald Rumsfeld and the White House, determined to get "actionable intelligence" from the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and our other detention legal holes, "wanted 'Geneva' [the Geneva Conventions] out of the way."
Early in the program, Frontline illuminates the repellent complicity of the "small circle of lawyers who surrounded the president" and "together would create a legal theory that would permit the United States to act unilaterally in defining the "rules of war"?and justifying the unprecedented powers to be given to George W. Bush?including the authorization of torture.
These lawyers have themselves not been brought to justice or to any formal inquiry into their culpability. As I've noted in previous columns, John Yoo, then in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, often on television and lecturing at other campuses.
Another participant in the famous "torture memos," Jay S. Bybee, then an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, has been elevated to a federal judgeship at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And Jack Goldsmith, formerly of the Office of Legal Counsel, has become a law professor at Harvard.
Above them in the circle around the president were lawyers highlighted by Frontlin e: Alberto Gonzales, then the president's chief legal counsel; David Addington, the vice president's top lawyer and now chief of staff; and Wil liam Haynes, Rumsfeld's civilian counsel at the Pentagon and later nominated by the president to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
"The Torture Question" points to one of many results of these lawyers' providing the president with the power to bypass both international and our own laws. The testimony is from an FBI agent at Guant�namo:
"I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more." This, of course, was on Donald Rumsfeld's watch.
The American Civil Liberties Union has released copies of e-mails to FBI director Robert Mueller from appalled FBI agents protesting the unlawful, inhumane interrogations they had witnessed. Director Mueller himself has never joined their protests nor acknowledged any acts of torture at Abu Ghraib, Guant�namo, or any of our other "detention" facilities.
In The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge University Press), edited by Karen J. Greenberg, director of NYU law school's Center of Law and Security, NYU law professor Burt Neuborne asks: "Is there something that we are not doing in American law schools that is allowing the best and the brightest of our profession to drift into a situation where they think that all they have to do is find an argument that will justify their client's goal?"
There are all kinds of symposia and conferences at American law schools, and I wonder if there have been any focused on this circle of highly skilled lawyers around the president who provided such encouragement to Donald Rumsfeld and his generals (and lesser officers in the field) to get "actionable intelligence" from prisoners by any means necessary.
Has the American Bar Association, which vigorously criticized some of Rumsfeld's and the president's twisting of the rule of law, looked into the legal ethics of this so far charmed circle of alumni attorneys of the Justice and Defense departments?
The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the nation's premier bar association?
and Scott Horton, the chair of its Committee of International Law?certainly have. Maybe they can offer their services to the ABA.
Frontline has given the nation much to think about. For further instance, from a soldier on the ground: "Most of the abuses around Iraq are not photographed . . .
so they'll never get any outrage out of it. And this makes it even harsher, because around Iraq, in the back of a Humvee or in a shipping container . . . there's no one looking over your shoulder, so you can do anything you want."
And, from former Army interrogator Anthony Lagouranis: "Now it's all over Iraq . . . the infantry units are torturing people in their homes. They were using things like burns. They would smash people's feet with the back of an ax head. They would break bones, ribs, you know . . . that was serious stuff."
As John McCain said, speaking of the terrorist enemy, "This isn't about who they are. This is about who we are." Hail to the chief!
How our governments use terrorism to control us
How our governments use terrorism to control us
Special Reports
How our governments use terrorism to control us
By Tim Howells
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Nov 28, 2005, 13:55
The sponsorship of terrorism by western governments, targeting their own populations, has been a taboo subject. Although major scandals have received cursory coverage in the media, the subject has been allowed to immediately disappear without discussion or investigation. Therefore the appearance this year of two major studies of this subject is a welcome breakthrough, and provides essential reading for anyone struggling to understand the events of September 11, 2001 and the post September 11 world.
The studies are complementary. NATO's Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe by Daniele Ganser concerns terrorism sponsored by American and British intelligence in Western Europe and Turkey between the end of World War II and 1985. The War on Truth, 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed chronicles the cultivation and sponsorship of militant Islamic terrorism by the intelligence services of the United States, Britain and Russia from 1979 to the present. Both studies are models of scholarship -- meticulously documented and carefully reasoned -- but the world they reveal will boggle the mind of the most wild-eyed conspiracy theorist.
Creating "Communist" Terrorism to Fuel the Cold War
NATO's Secret Armies describes how following World War II the US and Britain, fearing a Soviet invasion of Europe, established "stay-behind" paramilitary units throughout Western Europe and in Turkey. Had the anticipated Soviet invasion occurred these units would have constituted ready made resistance groups, trained and armed, with secure communications with each other and with their allies in Britain and the US. In some counties, for example Norway and Sweden, these stay-behind units were true to their original charters, remaining inactive until they disbanded at the end of the Cold War. In other countries, however, the paramilitary units were activated by their handlers in the United States as part of a hellish "Strategy of Tension" designed to convince left-leaning populations in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Turkey and other countries that their very lives were at risk from communist terrorists. The arms and bombs originally intended for the Soviets were turned instead on their own compatriots with the aim of placing the blame for the waves of terrorist attacks on communists.
In Italy the stay-behind operation was referred to as Gladio (Latin for "Sword"). The Piazza Fontana bombings that killed 16 and wounded 80 shortly before Christmas in 1969 initiated a wave of terrorist bombings in Italy by Gladio operatives that continued throughout the 1970s. The worst single bombing occurred in the Bologna train station in 1980, killing 85 and wounding 200. Another Gladio bombing in Brescia in 1974 killed eight and wounded 102, and the same year a train was bombed in Rome, killing 12 and wounding 48. The case that led to the discovery of the Gladio plots by the Italian courts was a 1972 bombing that killed three policemen.
The Gladio operations in Italy are relatively well known and well understood because of several high level judicial investigations that received coverage in the European press and have been the subject of a few books. One contribution of Ganser's book is to bring this material together in a concise and well organised format. Further, Ganser extends his study beyond Italy to examine the effects of stay-behind operations throughout Western Europe and in Turkey.
I was quite surprised to learn that by far the most extensive and destructive stay-behind operations were those carried out in Turkey under the code name Counter-Guerrilla. Among other crimes, a long series of bombings, random killings and assassinations, covertly perpetrated by CIA-controlled Counter-Guerrilla operatives in the late 1970s, were used as a pretext for the military coup in 1980 that led to the installation of a pro-American and pro-Israeli government there. I was also shocked to learn that stay-behind operatives were responsible for a series of horrific terrorist attacks in Belgium as late in the Cold War as 1985, although this is still the subject of unconvincing official denials.
One limitation of Ganser's study, which he frequently laments, is the unavailability of official documentation because all materials relating to the stay-behind operations remain highly classified. All Freedom of Information Act requests to date have been denied by American authorities. One might have hoped that at least with the end of the Cold War such atrocious strategies would be renounced, and that the implicated governments would make every effort to come clean and ensure that this history would not be repeated. Unfortunately, as The War on Truth by Nafeez Ahmed makes clear, the Strategy of Tension has proved to be so useful a tool both in terms of global and domestic politics that, far from being abandoned, these despicable operations have become increasingly accepted and commonplace.
Creating "Islamic" Terrorism for the Post-Cold War Era
Ahmed's study centres on the attacks of September 11, 2001, but the story begins in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter at the time, has described in an interview how, even prior to the invasion, the US had taken steps to fund the Mujahedeen warlords and to inflame militant Islam in the region. The aim was to destabilise the region and to force the Soviets to invade -- to draw them into their own Vietnam-style quagmire.
According to Brzezinski, "We did not push the Russians into invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would. That secret operation was an excellent idea. The effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap."
After the Soviets' inglorious retreat from Afghanistan, and even more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union several years later, the policy of inflaming and exploiting militant Islam was credited by many in the US national security establishment for these historic developments. Ahmed has compiled irrefutable evidence that the United States did not abandon the militant Islamists after the end of the Cold War. In fact, American leadership at the very highest levels has continued to covertly protect, assist and guide militant Islam in general and al-Qaeda in particular in geopolitically important areas around the world, including Central Asia, North Africa, the Balkans, and the Philippines.
It is impossible to do justice to Ahmed's densely packed 390-page presentation here, but I will give some representative examples.
Sergeant Ali Mohamed Joins al-Qaeda
Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian intelligence officer, was fired in 1984 because of his religious extremism. In spite of this and in spite of the fact that his name was on the State Department's terrorist watch list, he was granted a visa to enter the US and became a US citizen. By 1986 he was a sergeant in the US Army and an instructor at the elite Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. While in this position Mohamed travelled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden, and he assisted with the training of al-Qaeda operatives both in Afghanistan and in the US. His immediate supervisors at Fort Bragg were duly alarmed by these illegal activities, and reported them up the chain of command. When their reports failed to produce any action, not even an official debriefing of Mohamed upon his return from Afghanistan, at least one of his supervisors, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, concluded that Mohamed had been acting as part of an operation sanctioned by an American intelligence agency, "probably the CIA."
Mohamed's activities in support of al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s were of the highest significance to that organisation. In 1991, he handled security for bin Laden's move from Saudi Arabia to the Sudan. In 1993, Mohamed accompanied bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, on a fund raising tour of the United States, again handling security arrangements. The funds raised helped support Zawahiri in a Pentagon supported mission in the Balkans, which will be discussed in the next section.
The al-Qaeda members trained by Mohamed in the United States included several who were later convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Top secret US Army training manuals supplied by Mohamed to the defendants were produced as evidence at their trial.
Mohamed himself did the initial surveillance for the al-Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At the time Mohamed was on active reserve with the Special Forces and was a paid FBI informant. Mohamed was at long last charged with crimes in connection with the 1998 embassy bombings. In October 2000, he was convicted of five counts of conspiracy to murder nationals of the United States. However, the nature of Mohamed's plea agreement, the sentence handed down, if any, and Mohamed's present whereabouts remain secret.
The Pentagon Brings al-Qaeda to the Balkans
The US national security establishment did not miss a beat in seeking to replicate the triumph in Afghanistan in other geopolitically critical areas. The Soviet puppet regime fell in Afghanistan in February 1992. That same year, the Pentagon started importing Afghan jihadists organised by bin Laden into Bosnia to wreak chaos and fuel the civil wars between Muslims and Serbs that devastated the former Yugoslavia in the following years. Bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, served as commander of the Mujahedeen forces in the Balkans.
The role of the Pentagon in airlifting the Mujahedeen terrorists into Bosnia and Kosovo between 1992 to 1995 has been well documented and widely reported in the European and Canadian media, but almost completely ignored in the United States. However, the geopolitical advantages of breaking the former sovereign nation of Yugoslavia into a patchwork of NATO protectorates, under the firm control of the United States, did not go unnoted. New Republic editors Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind celebrated the event in a New York Times article titled "The Third American Empire" published on January 2, 1996:
"Instead of seeing Bosnia as the eastern frontier of NATO, we should view the Balkans as the western frontier of America's rapidly expanding sphere of influence in the Middle East . . . The regions once ruled by the Ottoman Turks show signs of becoming the heart of a third American empire . . . The main purpose of NATO countries, for the foreseeable future, will be to serve as staging areas for American wars in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf."
The CIA Brings al-Qaeda to the Philippines
In 1991, with the Afghan War winding down, the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group was formed in the Philippines around a core of radical Afghan veterans. They conducted their first kidnapping operation in 1992, and were responsible for a series of bombings and kidnappings throughout the 1990s that were highly destabilising for the Philippine government. Several high level al-Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed were involved. Funding was provided by one of bin Laden's brothers in law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, an important figure in the funding of al-Qaeda operations worldwide.
Ahmed cites many authoritative sources, including Philippine intelligence officer Rene Jarque, Lt. Col. Ricardo Morales, and Senator Aquilino Q. Pimentel, to show that the Abu-Sayyaf group has received special assistance and protection both from the Philippine military and from the United States. Pimentel in a speech before the Philippine Senate in July of 2000 accused the CIA of creating the terrorist organisation with the help of their contacts in the Philippine military and intelligence communities.
Two incidents in particular have exposed the connivance of the United States in the Abu Sayyaf reign of terror beyond a reasonable doubt. In December of 1994, Khalifa was arrested during a visit to San Francisco on immigration violations. The FBI was aware of his ties to the Abu Sayyaf group and to al-Qaeda, and began a criminal investigation. Khalifa's lawyers tried to stall the investigation and manoeuvre for extradition to Jordan. Incredibly, help came to Khalifa from on high. Secretary of State Warren Christopher personally wrote a three-page letter to Attorney General Janet Reno asking that the request for extradition be granted. Accordingly, the FBI investigation was cancelled and Khalifa was sent to Jordan per his own request, where he was soon a free man.
The second incident is even more extraordinary and revealing. Michael Meiring, an American citizen, arrived in the Philippines in 1992 and promptly formed close working relationships both with high government officials and with rebel leaders in the Abu Sayyaf group. In 2002, in the midst of a wave of Abu Sayyaf bombings, Meiring accidentally detonated a bomb in his own hotel room in Mindao causing grave injury to himself, requiring emergency hospitalisation. US authorities immediately intervened. FBI agents and "agents of the National Security Council" swept him away from his hospital room, first to a hospital in Manila where Meiring was kept incommunicado and was treated by a doctor hand-picked by the US embassy. Then Meiring was rushed back to the United States. Like Ali Mohamed, his fate and current whereabouts are unknown. Numerous attempts to have him extradited back to the Philippines for prosecution have been stonewalled by US authorities.
The motivations for American support of terrorism in the Philippines are not hard to guess. In 1991, the same year that Abu Sayyaf was formed, the Philippines Senate had voted to close all US military bases in their country, an action with profound implications for the military posture of the United States in South Asia. In 2002, due to the destabilising effects of the Abu Sayyaf operations, the US military were invited back into the country to participate in operation Balikatan ("shoulder to shoulder"), a joint US/Philippine military exercise purportedly aimed at eliminating terrorism. These operations required special exemptions from the Philippine Constitution, which forbids foreign armies from operating on Philippine soil. Once again, al-Qaeda, with the help of their American friends, had acted to advance the geostrategic interests of the United States.
The Grand Design
The above examples are by no means isolated anomalies. The bulk of Ahmed's fine book is devoted to recording a pattern of evidence that is finally overwhelming. As he says in conclusion, "not only does the strategy employed in the new 'War on Terror' seem to provoke terrorism, but an integral dimension of the strategy is the protection of key actors culpable in the financial, logistical, and military-intelligence support of international terrorism."
And Then There Is September 11 Itself . . .
But what about the September 11 attacks themselves? Were they "blowback," i.e., unintended domestic consequences of foreign covert operations, or were they an integral part of the Strategy of Tension? Based in part on an analysis of intelligence warnings of the attacks, and on the absence of any air defence response, Ahmed strongly endorses the latter view. He reviews the dozens of very specific foreign and domestic intelligence warnings of terrorist attacks in the United States using airliners that came in the months leading up to the attacks. These in turn led to warnings issued by American intelligence to Pentagon officials, and to others, including author Salman Rushdie and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, to cancel all flight plans on the day of September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, no action whatsoever was taken to warn or to protect the American public.
Ahmed points out that the responsible authorities at the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration have produced several profoundly contradictory accounts of their own actions on that day -- each subsequent story seemingly an attempt to remedy the shortcomings of a previous one. And still no remotely satisfactory account of the failure to intercept even one of the four hijacked airliners has been produced. Under ordinary circumstances, interception of wayward aircraft by military fighters would have been absolutely routine; such interceptions occurred at least 56 times in the calendar year prior to September 11, 2001. Ahmed points out that the attacks were allowed to proceed "entirely unhindered for over one and one half hours in the most restricted airspace in the world." He finds the idea that this was due to negligence beyond belief. Instead he argues that there must have been a deliberate stand-down of the air defence system managed by senior national security officials including the vice president and the secretary of defense.
The Future of the Strategy of Tension
The books reviewed herein document a continuous history over the last 40 years of the United States and other governments fostering and manipulating terrorism for their own ends. Terrorist organisations have been used to destabilise inconvenient regimes around the world, and to sow chaos, which can then serve as a pretext for military intervention.
Even more importantly, terrorism is used to create a crisis atmosphere at home under cover of which the crimes and corruption of government officials go unpunished, civil liberties are easily abandoned, and major wars can be launched under false pretences. Although at present there appears to be no reason for the terror-masters in Washington to consider changing their tactics, the publication this year of these two illuminating books raises the hope that the Strategy of Tension, which can only thrive in darkness and confusion, will ultimately have to be abandoned.
# # # # #
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism, Olive Branch Press, An imprint of Interlink Publishing, 2005, Northampton, MA
Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Frank Cass, 2005, London and New York
Copyright ? 1998-2005 Online Journal
Email Online Journal Editor
Special Reports
How our governments use terrorism to control us
By Tim Howells
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Nov 28, 2005, 13:55
The sponsorship of terrorism by western governments, targeting their own populations, has been a taboo subject. Although major scandals have received cursory coverage in the media, the subject has been allowed to immediately disappear without discussion or investigation. Therefore the appearance this year of two major studies of this subject is a welcome breakthrough, and provides essential reading for anyone struggling to understand the events of September 11, 2001 and the post September 11 world.
The studies are complementary. NATO's Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe by Daniele Ganser concerns terrorism sponsored by American and British intelligence in Western Europe and Turkey between the end of World War II and 1985. The War on Truth, 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed chronicles the cultivation and sponsorship of militant Islamic terrorism by the intelligence services of the United States, Britain and Russia from 1979 to the present. Both studies are models of scholarship -- meticulously documented and carefully reasoned -- but the world they reveal will boggle the mind of the most wild-eyed conspiracy theorist.
Creating "Communist" Terrorism to Fuel the Cold War
NATO's Secret Armies describes how following World War II the US and Britain, fearing a Soviet invasion of Europe, established "stay-behind" paramilitary units throughout Western Europe and in Turkey. Had the anticipated Soviet invasion occurred these units would have constituted ready made resistance groups, trained and armed, with secure communications with each other and with their allies in Britain and the US. In some counties, for example Norway and Sweden, these stay-behind units were true to their original charters, remaining inactive until they disbanded at the end of the Cold War. In other countries, however, the paramilitary units were activated by their handlers in the United States as part of a hellish "Strategy of Tension" designed to convince left-leaning populations in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Turkey and other countries that their very lives were at risk from communist terrorists. The arms and bombs originally intended for the Soviets were turned instead on their own compatriots with the aim of placing the blame for the waves of terrorist attacks on communists.
In Italy the stay-behind operation was referred to as Gladio (Latin for "Sword"). The Piazza Fontana bombings that killed 16 and wounded 80 shortly before Christmas in 1969 initiated a wave of terrorist bombings in Italy by Gladio operatives that continued throughout the 1970s. The worst single bombing occurred in the Bologna train station in 1980, killing 85 and wounding 200. Another Gladio bombing in Brescia in 1974 killed eight and wounded 102, and the same year a train was bombed in Rome, killing 12 and wounding 48. The case that led to the discovery of the Gladio plots by the Italian courts was a 1972 bombing that killed three policemen.
The Gladio operations in Italy are relatively well known and well understood because of several high level judicial investigations that received coverage in the European press and have been the subject of a few books. One contribution of Ganser's book is to bring this material together in a concise and well organised format. Further, Ganser extends his study beyond Italy to examine the effects of stay-behind operations throughout Western Europe and in Turkey.
I was quite surprised to learn that by far the most extensive and destructive stay-behind operations were those carried out in Turkey under the code name Counter-Guerrilla. Among other crimes, a long series of bombings, random killings and assassinations, covertly perpetrated by CIA-controlled Counter-Guerrilla operatives in the late 1970s, were used as a pretext for the military coup in 1980 that led to the installation of a pro-American and pro-Israeli government there. I was also shocked to learn that stay-behind operatives were responsible for a series of horrific terrorist attacks in Belgium as late in the Cold War as 1985, although this is still the subject of unconvincing official denials.
One limitation of Ganser's study, which he frequently laments, is the unavailability of official documentation because all materials relating to the stay-behind operations remain highly classified. All Freedom of Information Act requests to date have been denied by American authorities. One might have hoped that at least with the end of the Cold War such atrocious strategies would be renounced, and that the implicated governments would make every effort to come clean and ensure that this history would not be repeated. Unfortunately, as The War on Truth by Nafeez Ahmed makes clear, the Strategy of Tension has proved to be so useful a tool both in terms of global and domestic politics that, far from being abandoned, these despicable operations have become increasingly accepted and commonplace.
Creating "Islamic" Terrorism for the Post-Cold War Era
Ahmed's study centres on the attacks of September 11, 2001, but the story begins in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter at the time, has described in an interview how, even prior to the invasion, the US had taken steps to fund the Mujahedeen warlords and to inflame militant Islam in the region. The aim was to destabilise the region and to force the Soviets to invade -- to draw them into their own Vietnam-style quagmire.
According to Brzezinski, "We did not push the Russians into invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would. That secret operation was an excellent idea. The effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap."
After the Soviets' inglorious retreat from Afghanistan, and even more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union several years later, the policy of inflaming and exploiting militant Islam was credited by many in the US national security establishment for these historic developments. Ahmed has compiled irrefutable evidence that the United States did not abandon the militant Islamists after the end of the Cold War. In fact, American leadership at the very highest levels has continued to covertly protect, assist and guide militant Islam in general and al-Qaeda in particular in geopolitically important areas around the world, including Central Asia, North Africa, the Balkans, and the Philippines.
It is impossible to do justice to Ahmed's densely packed 390-page presentation here, but I will give some representative examples.
Sergeant Ali Mohamed Joins al-Qaeda
Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian intelligence officer, was fired in 1984 because of his religious extremism. In spite of this and in spite of the fact that his name was on the State Department's terrorist watch list, he was granted a visa to enter the US and became a US citizen. By 1986 he was a sergeant in the US Army and an instructor at the elite Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. While in this position Mohamed travelled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden, and he assisted with the training of al-Qaeda operatives both in Afghanistan and in the US. His immediate supervisors at Fort Bragg were duly alarmed by these illegal activities, and reported them up the chain of command. When their reports failed to produce any action, not even an official debriefing of Mohamed upon his return from Afghanistan, at least one of his supervisors, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, concluded that Mohamed had been acting as part of an operation sanctioned by an American intelligence agency, "probably the CIA."
Mohamed's activities in support of al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s were of the highest significance to that organisation. In 1991, he handled security for bin Laden's move from Saudi Arabia to the Sudan. In 1993, Mohamed accompanied bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, on a fund raising tour of the United States, again handling security arrangements. The funds raised helped support Zawahiri in a Pentagon supported mission in the Balkans, which will be discussed in the next section.
The al-Qaeda members trained by Mohamed in the United States included several who were later convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Top secret US Army training manuals supplied by Mohamed to the defendants were produced as evidence at their trial.
Mohamed himself did the initial surveillance for the al-Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At the time Mohamed was on active reserve with the Special Forces and was a paid FBI informant. Mohamed was at long last charged with crimes in connection with the 1998 embassy bombings. In October 2000, he was convicted of five counts of conspiracy to murder nationals of the United States. However, the nature of Mohamed's plea agreement, the sentence handed down, if any, and Mohamed's present whereabouts remain secret.
The Pentagon Brings al-Qaeda to the Balkans
The US national security establishment did not miss a beat in seeking to replicate the triumph in Afghanistan in other geopolitically critical areas. The Soviet puppet regime fell in Afghanistan in February 1992. That same year, the Pentagon started importing Afghan jihadists organised by bin Laden into Bosnia to wreak chaos and fuel the civil wars between Muslims and Serbs that devastated the former Yugoslavia in the following years. Bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, served as commander of the Mujahedeen forces in the Balkans.
The role of the Pentagon in airlifting the Mujahedeen terrorists into Bosnia and Kosovo between 1992 to 1995 has been well documented and widely reported in the European and Canadian media, but almost completely ignored in the United States. However, the geopolitical advantages of breaking the former sovereign nation of Yugoslavia into a patchwork of NATO protectorates, under the firm control of the United States, did not go unnoted. New Republic editors Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind celebrated the event in a New York Times article titled "The Third American Empire" published on January 2, 1996:
"Instead of seeing Bosnia as the eastern frontier of NATO, we should view the Balkans as the western frontier of America's rapidly expanding sphere of influence in the Middle East . . . The regions once ruled by the Ottoman Turks show signs of becoming the heart of a third American empire . . . The main purpose of NATO countries, for the foreseeable future, will be to serve as staging areas for American wars in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf."
The CIA Brings al-Qaeda to the Philippines
In 1991, with the Afghan War winding down, the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group was formed in the Philippines around a core of radical Afghan veterans. They conducted their first kidnapping operation in 1992, and were responsible for a series of bombings and kidnappings throughout the 1990s that were highly destabilising for the Philippine government. Several high level al-Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed were involved. Funding was provided by one of bin Laden's brothers in law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, an important figure in the funding of al-Qaeda operations worldwide.
Ahmed cites many authoritative sources, including Philippine intelligence officer Rene Jarque, Lt. Col. Ricardo Morales, and Senator Aquilino Q. Pimentel, to show that the Abu-Sayyaf group has received special assistance and protection both from the Philippine military and from the United States. Pimentel in a speech before the Philippine Senate in July of 2000 accused the CIA of creating the terrorist organisation with the help of their contacts in the Philippine military and intelligence communities.
Two incidents in particular have exposed the connivance of the United States in the Abu Sayyaf reign of terror beyond a reasonable doubt. In December of 1994, Khalifa was arrested during a visit to San Francisco on immigration violations. The FBI was aware of his ties to the Abu Sayyaf group and to al-Qaeda, and began a criminal investigation. Khalifa's lawyers tried to stall the investigation and manoeuvre for extradition to Jordan. Incredibly, help came to Khalifa from on high. Secretary of State Warren Christopher personally wrote a three-page letter to Attorney General Janet Reno asking that the request for extradition be granted. Accordingly, the FBI investigation was cancelled and Khalifa was sent to Jordan per his own request, where he was soon a free man.
The second incident is even more extraordinary and revealing. Michael Meiring, an American citizen, arrived in the Philippines in 1992 and promptly formed close working relationships both with high government officials and with rebel leaders in the Abu Sayyaf group. In 2002, in the midst of a wave of Abu Sayyaf bombings, Meiring accidentally detonated a bomb in his own hotel room in Mindao causing grave injury to himself, requiring emergency hospitalisation. US authorities immediately intervened. FBI agents and "agents of the National Security Council" swept him away from his hospital room, first to a hospital in Manila where Meiring was kept incommunicado and was treated by a doctor hand-picked by the US embassy. Then Meiring was rushed back to the United States. Like Ali Mohamed, his fate and current whereabouts are unknown. Numerous attempts to have him extradited back to the Philippines for prosecution have been stonewalled by US authorities.
The motivations for American support of terrorism in the Philippines are not hard to guess. In 1991, the same year that Abu Sayyaf was formed, the Philippines Senate had voted to close all US military bases in their country, an action with profound implications for the military posture of the United States in South Asia. In 2002, due to the destabilising effects of the Abu Sayyaf operations, the US military were invited back into the country to participate in operation Balikatan ("shoulder to shoulder"), a joint US/Philippine military exercise purportedly aimed at eliminating terrorism. These operations required special exemptions from the Philippine Constitution, which forbids foreign armies from operating on Philippine soil. Once again, al-Qaeda, with the help of their American friends, had acted to advance the geostrategic interests of the United States.
The Grand Design
The above examples are by no means isolated anomalies. The bulk of Ahmed's fine book is devoted to recording a pattern of evidence that is finally overwhelming. As he says in conclusion, "not only does the strategy employed in the new 'War on Terror' seem to provoke terrorism, but an integral dimension of the strategy is the protection of key actors culpable in the financial, logistical, and military-intelligence support of international terrorism."
And Then There Is September 11 Itself . . .
But what about the September 11 attacks themselves? Were they "blowback," i.e., unintended domestic consequences of foreign covert operations, or were they an integral part of the Strategy of Tension? Based in part on an analysis of intelligence warnings of the attacks, and on the absence of any air defence response, Ahmed strongly endorses the latter view. He reviews the dozens of very specific foreign and domestic intelligence warnings of terrorist attacks in the United States using airliners that came in the months leading up to the attacks. These in turn led to warnings issued by American intelligence to Pentagon officials, and to others, including author Salman Rushdie and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, to cancel all flight plans on the day of September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, no action whatsoever was taken to warn or to protect the American public.
Ahmed points out that the responsible authorities at the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration have produced several profoundly contradictory accounts of their own actions on that day -- each subsequent story seemingly an attempt to remedy the shortcomings of a previous one. And still no remotely satisfactory account of the failure to intercept even one of the four hijacked airliners has been produced. Under ordinary circumstances, interception of wayward aircraft by military fighters would have been absolutely routine; such interceptions occurred at least 56 times in the calendar year prior to September 11, 2001. Ahmed points out that the attacks were allowed to proceed "entirely unhindered for over one and one half hours in the most restricted airspace in the world." He finds the idea that this was due to negligence beyond belief. Instead he argues that there must have been a deliberate stand-down of the air defence system managed by senior national security officials including the vice president and the secretary of defense.
The Future of the Strategy of Tension
The books reviewed herein document a continuous history over the last 40 years of the United States and other governments fostering and manipulating terrorism for their own ends. Terrorist organisations have been used to destabilise inconvenient regimes around the world, and to sow chaos, which can then serve as a pretext for military intervention.
Even more importantly, terrorism is used to create a crisis atmosphere at home under cover of which the crimes and corruption of government officials go unpunished, civil liberties are easily abandoned, and major wars can be launched under false pretences. Although at present there appears to be no reason for the terror-masters in Washington to consider changing their tactics, the publication this year of these two illuminating books raises the hope that the Strategy of Tension, which can only thrive in darkness and confusion, will ultimately have to be abandoned.
# # # # #
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism, Olive Branch Press, An imprint of Interlink Publishing, 2005, Northampton, MA
Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Frank Cass, 2005, London and New York
Copyright ? 1998-2005 Online Journal
Email Online Journal Editor
Nimmo-Pentagon Black Ops: Abducting Peacemakers in Iraq
Pentagon Black Ops: Abducting Peacemakers in Iraq
Tuesday November 29th 2005, 8:41 pm
It is possible Norman Kember is a spy, as charged by the Swords of Righteousness brigade in Iraq. However, considering the work of the Christian Peacemaker organization and the fact Kember is 74 years old, it is unlikely he is a spy. Kember and three other Christian peace activists were abducted by the unknown terrorist group and a videotape of them was released yesterday. ?Family and friends of Mr. Kember, a grandfather who lives with his wife Pat in Pinner, north-west London, appealed to the kidnappers to release him last night,? reports the Guardian.
?The Rev Alan Betteridge, from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, of which Mr. Kember is a member, said he was a ?genuine peace activist?? Mr. Kember, who campaigned against the war in Iraq, was seized on Saturday from a mosque he was visiting in a Sunni area of western Baghdad with the three other hostages. It has been reported that they were talking to Muslim clerics about the abuse of Sunni detainees,? more than enough reason for Kember to be abducted by black op ?insurgents? who ? just grabbed? the name Swords of Righteousness ?out of the air, a tactic which goes back to Beirut,? according to the Guardian. It should be remembered that the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was also kidnapped as she prepared to interview survivors of Fallujah, now admitted to have been attacked with chemical weapons and a napalm derivative.
One look at the CPT (Christian Peacemaker Teams) in Iraq website and it becomes obvious who abducted Kember and his associates and why. CPT has worked as ?an alternative voice to the reporters ?embedded? with Coalition forces,? have used ?their bodies to protect critical civilian infra-structure such as water treatment facilities, electrical plants, and hospitals,? have documented ?abuse of detainees by Coalition forces,? and ?have ventured forth in response to urging from Iraqi human rights workers in Karbala.? No doubt all of this Christian activity sincerely upsets the Pentagon and the Bushcons.
In December, 2004, CPT was ?compelled? to ?severely curtail its size and visibility? due to kidnappings of foreign aid workers. It appears the Swords of Righteousness brigade, unheard of before Kember and the three other CPT members were snatched, was created in order to deliver a coup de gr�ce to CPT, a sincerely Christian organization initiated ?by Mennonites, Brethren and Quakers with broad ecumenical participation.?
CPT?s ministry is a ?Biblically-based and spiritually-centered peacemaking? effort that ?emphasizes creative public witness, nonviolent direct action and protection of human rights,? that it to say it is diametrically opposed to the Bushian version of Christianity?
a Manichean, Christian Zionist, Islamophobic, misanthropic, and paranoid non-religion designed to punish Arabs and Muslims the same way Likudite Zionists have punished (and methodically continue to commit slow genocide) against the Palestinians and other Arabs considered to be sub-human and thus expendable. In fact, the Bushian Christian Zionists have embraced Zionist brutality in their quest (or rather modern-day Crusade) to support their idealized version of Israel as portrayed in their take on the Bible and the Second Coming of Christ (in the Christian Zionist political-religious take on the Second Coming and premillennialism, the Jews of Israel either accept Jesus as their savior or burn in the fires of Hell with the rest of us?
of course, the Israeli Zionists rightly believe the dominionist Christian Zionists are bonkers, but being opportunists can?t help themselves). Of course, the Bush neocons, primarily Straussian and Zionist, don?t actually believe in God or anything else except taking over the world and making sure a couple million Israelis rule over 187,258,006 (as of 2005) Arabs and Middle Eastern Muslims.
It makes absolutely no sense for the Iraqi resistance to kidnap Kember and his associates. Kember worked directly with the Iraqi people and chances are slim to none he had any significant contact with the legitimate Iraqi resistance. It is absurd to think the Iraqi resistance?a movement drawing operational strength from its decentralized and secretive ?cell? structure?
would compromise itself by dealing with CPT or any other organization and thus possibly falling victim to spying. On the other hand, it is safe to assume if there were indeed spies in CPT?military intelligence spies working for the Pentagon or Iraqi intelligence (the two are interdependent and mutually inclusive).
Unfortunately, it does not look good for Kember and his hapless associates. Lately the Pentagon has suffered from devastating public relations?
from revelations concerning the weapons of mass destruction attacks on Fallujah to emerging details about Bush?s airborne ?frequent flier miles? rape and torture gulag to the commonly held belief the traitorous neocons lied the United States into a disastrous invasion and occupation?
and in order to set things right ?on the ground? in Iraq (in preparation for a new round of Vietnam-styled ?rolling thunder? bombing campaigns and black op terror and assassination programs), do-gooders such as Kember and the CPT have to be run out of Iraq.
:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=18297
:: The incoming address of this article is :
kurtnimmo.com/?p=144
Tuesday November 29th 2005, 8:41 pm
It is possible Norman Kember is a spy, as charged by the Swords of Righteousness brigade in Iraq. However, considering the work of the Christian Peacemaker organization and the fact Kember is 74 years old, it is unlikely he is a spy. Kember and three other Christian peace activists were abducted by the unknown terrorist group and a videotape of them was released yesterday. ?Family and friends of Mr. Kember, a grandfather who lives with his wife Pat in Pinner, north-west London, appealed to the kidnappers to release him last night,? reports the Guardian.
?The Rev Alan Betteridge, from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, of which Mr. Kember is a member, said he was a ?genuine peace activist?? Mr. Kember, who campaigned against the war in Iraq, was seized on Saturday from a mosque he was visiting in a Sunni area of western Baghdad with the three other hostages. It has been reported that they were talking to Muslim clerics about the abuse of Sunni detainees,? more than enough reason for Kember to be abducted by black op ?insurgents? who ? just grabbed? the name Swords of Righteousness ?out of the air, a tactic which goes back to Beirut,? according to the Guardian. It should be remembered that the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was also kidnapped as she prepared to interview survivors of Fallujah, now admitted to have been attacked with chemical weapons and a napalm derivative.
One look at the CPT (Christian Peacemaker Teams) in Iraq website and it becomes obvious who abducted Kember and his associates and why. CPT has worked as ?an alternative voice to the reporters ?embedded? with Coalition forces,? have used ?their bodies to protect critical civilian infra-structure such as water treatment facilities, electrical plants, and hospitals,? have documented ?abuse of detainees by Coalition forces,? and ?have ventured forth in response to urging from Iraqi human rights workers in Karbala.? No doubt all of this Christian activity sincerely upsets the Pentagon and the Bushcons.
In December, 2004, CPT was ?compelled? to ?severely curtail its size and visibility? due to kidnappings of foreign aid workers. It appears the Swords of Righteousness brigade, unheard of before Kember and the three other CPT members were snatched, was created in order to deliver a coup de gr�ce to CPT, a sincerely Christian organization initiated ?by Mennonites, Brethren and Quakers with broad ecumenical participation.?
CPT?s ministry is a ?Biblically-based and spiritually-centered peacemaking? effort that ?emphasizes creative public witness, nonviolent direct action and protection of human rights,? that it to say it is diametrically opposed to the Bushian version of Christianity?
a Manichean, Christian Zionist, Islamophobic, misanthropic, and paranoid non-religion designed to punish Arabs and Muslims the same way Likudite Zionists have punished (and methodically continue to commit slow genocide) against the Palestinians and other Arabs considered to be sub-human and thus expendable. In fact, the Bushian Christian Zionists have embraced Zionist brutality in their quest (or rather modern-day Crusade) to support their idealized version of Israel as portrayed in their take on the Bible and the Second Coming of Christ (in the Christian Zionist political-religious take on the Second Coming and premillennialism, the Jews of Israel either accept Jesus as their savior or burn in the fires of Hell with the rest of us?
of course, the Israeli Zionists rightly believe the dominionist Christian Zionists are bonkers, but being opportunists can?t help themselves). Of course, the Bush neocons, primarily Straussian and Zionist, don?t actually believe in God or anything else except taking over the world and making sure a couple million Israelis rule over 187,258,006 (as of 2005) Arabs and Middle Eastern Muslims.
It makes absolutely no sense for the Iraqi resistance to kidnap Kember and his associates. Kember worked directly with the Iraqi people and chances are slim to none he had any significant contact with the legitimate Iraqi resistance. It is absurd to think the Iraqi resistance?a movement drawing operational strength from its decentralized and secretive ?cell? structure?
would compromise itself by dealing with CPT or any other organization and thus possibly falling victim to spying. On the other hand, it is safe to assume if there were indeed spies in CPT?military intelligence spies working for the Pentagon or Iraqi intelligence (the two are interdependent and mutually inclusive).
Unfortunately, it does not look good for Kember and his hapless associates. Lately the Pentagon has suffered from devastating public relations?
from revelations concerning the weapons of mass destruction attacks on Fallujah to emerging details about Bush?s airborne ?frequent flier miles? rape and torture gulag to the commonly held belief the traitorous neocons lied the United States into a disastrous invasion and occupation?
and in order to set things right ?on the ground? in Iraq (in preparation for a new round of Vietnam-styled ?rolling thunder? bombing campaigns and black op terror and assassination programs), do-gooders such as Kember and the CPT have to be run out of Iraq.
:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=18297
:: The incoming address of this article is :
kurtnimmo.com/?p=144
The World's Most Dangerous Man
The World's Most Dangerous Man
It's George W. Bush
Justin Raimondo
It's George W. Bush
Justin Raimondo
November 30, 2005
As a groggy and very hung-over American hegemon wakes from a dream of imperial dominion and faces the harsh light of morning in war-torn Iraq, the cruel reality of what General William E. Odom calls "the greatest strategic disaster" in our history is beginning to dawn on our political and military elites. The U.S. Senate, which originally signed on to the president's war policy by a 77-23 vote, is backing away, and even some in the president's own party are beginning to voice strong doubts about "staying the course." Especially when we are on a course set for the same disastrous fate that eventually overtook all the strutting imperialists of times past, who took on a weaker opponent only to find that there are different kinds of strength. As Martin van Creveld, a military historian of some note, put it in an interview not so long ago:
"Basically it's always a question of the relationship of forces. If you are strong, and you are fighting the weak for any period of time, you are going to become weak yourself. If you behave like a coward then you are going to become cowardly – it's only a question of time. The same happened to the British when they were here... the same happened to the French in Algeria... the same happened to the Americans in Vietnam... the same happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan... the same happened to so many people that I can't even count them."
Van Creveld was speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the same principle applies to the Iraqi insurgency in spades, and I want to quote him at length because I have not read a clearer exposition of the strategic dilemma in which we now find ourselves.
"Question: Martin you used the word 'cowardly' yet what we've seen tonight – these commando units, the anti-terrorist squads – these aren't cowardly people.
"Van Creveld: I agree with you. They are very brave people... they are idealists... they want to serve their country and they want to prove themselves. The problem is that you cannot prove yourself against someone who is much weaker than yourself. They are in a lose/lose situation. If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot. So here is a dilemma which others have suffered before us, and for which as far as I can see there is simply no escape."
No escape – that is precisely van Creveld's evaluation of our present conundrum, which, in his view, has earned our leaders the sharpest rebuke imaginable:
"For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins."
This isn't some poster over at DailyKos.com or Democratic Underground talking: van Creveld is the author of some 15 books on military history and strategy, including Supplying War (1977), Command in War (1985), and The Sword and the Olive (1998), and has been on the faculty of Hebrew University in Israel since 1971.
Yes, says van Creveld, we must withdraw, and it will be a long and very painful retreat, likely to incur many casualties, but it is nevertheless "inevitable." Yet, in his view:
"A complete American withdrawal is not an option; the region, with its vast oil reserves, is simply too important for that. A continued military presence, made up of air, sea and a moderate number of ground forces, will be needed."
The genie has busted out of the bottle, and – to mix metaphorical fables – all the president's men cannot put it back together again. If the idea of invading Iraq was to commit us irrevocably to a course set for perpetual war, then surely the cabal that lied us into Iraq has succeeded. The "creative destruction" they pined for has been visited on the Middle East, and the pillars of stability have been shattered, ushering in a new and far more credible threat to the region: the Shi'ite mullahs of Iran.
The irony is that, in conjuring a nonexistent nuclear-armed threat in Baghdad, we wound up empowering a real-world version of that imaginary monster – in Tehran.
Perhaps this is what Bush was saying when, a few weeks after demolishing the Iraqi regime, he proclaimed "Mission accomplished."
Van Creveld is right that Bush and the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal need to be put on trial – in my view, the charge should be treason – but wrong when it comes to his existentialist "no exit" stance, which makes about as much sense – from an American perspective – as Sartre's play, i.e., very little.
The vast oil reserves [.pdf] in the region are not, after all, going to disappear: whoever pumps it has to sell it to someone, and that is inevitably going to be us: it is a question of price, not availability. As Michael Scheuer, former CIA analyst in charge of the bin Laden unit, points out, a key plank in al-Qaeda's platform of anti-Western grievances has been the complaint that we are getting their oil at cut-rate prices. If the rules of the marketplace – which the U.S., as the fountainhead of capitalism, is pledged to observe – were to be followed, then the artificially low prices paid by Western consumers for Middle Eastern oil would rise overnight – and we'd be forced to spend our money on the difference, rather than on what van Creveld describes as "the new weapons [which] are so few and so expensive that even the world's largest and richest power can afford only to field a relative handful of them."
Perhaps that wouldn't be such a bad tradeoff after all.
The sense of crisis expressed by one of the foremost military tacticians of the day is shared by many in Washington, and among the military. That's why Rep. Jack Murtha, who has a long-standing relationship with the uniformed three-and-four-stars in the Pentagon, rose to give voice to the very real fears now shaking up the establishment. In calling for a withdrawal of American troops, and a complete turnaround in our regional policy, Rep. Murtha sent a seismic shockwave through the White House, which immediately responded by likening him to Michael Moore, the left-wing filmmaker demonized by the neocons as a symbol of "anti-Americanism." The hamhandedness of this White House is positively Soviet, and about as effective as the Kremlin's denunciations of Eastern European rebels and its own dissidents as "wreckers" and "agents of imperialism."
Ah, but rumor has it that we're in for a new era of perestroika, if not bipartisan glasnost, when it comes to Iraq policy. There has been increased speculation, of late, that the U.S. is getting ready to draw down the number of troops in Iraq and hand over the reins to the Iraqis, who are on the verge – as we are constantly assured – of standing up so we can, at long last, begin to stand down. The problem is that this is nonsense, as Seymour Hersh points out in his latest contribution to The New Yorker.
We aren't cutting and running, according to Hersh: we're cutting and bombing. The idea is to substitute air power for boots on the ground and cut down our losses. It'll be just like in the Kosovo war, when the "Kosovo Liberation Army" acted as spotters for our fighter jets, who would rain down death on targets scouted out by the KLA. That this will greatly increase Iraqi casualties, civilian as well as military, seems not to be a consideration: the assumption is that we'll be killing the bad guys, with the Iraqis doing most of the grunt work. Not everyone, however, is happy with this new strategic turn. The Air Force, says Hersh, is balking, and he quotes a senior Pentagon consultant who defines the problem inherent in such a strategy: "A lot of Iraqis want to settle old scores," but "who is going to have authority to call in air strikes?" As Chris Matthews pointed out on Hardball Tuesday, you're going to have the Air Force at the beck and call of Ahmed Chalabi, a prospect that ought to transfix American policymakers with the sheer horror of it.
We aren't withdrawing from Iraq: instead, the war is being intensified, with the so-called El Salvador option unleashed, as predicted here some months ago. Iraqi death squads are even now roaming the streets of our "liberated" province, murdering Sunnis and ravaging other centers of opposition to the consolidation of Shi'ite rule. The party militias – the Badr Brigade, the Da'wa Party, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada Sadr, and others – have taken over the Iraqi "police," and the fastening on of a new tyranny is taking place in Kurdistan, where the authorities are preparing an all-out attack on the Arab population. With the full authority and backing of the two major Kurdish parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), Arabs are being systematically forced out of their homes. Meanwhile, the ultra-nationalist Kurdish parties subsidize "settlements" for "repatriated" Kurds from all over the Middle East, in a conscious imitation of the Israelis.
Israel by the way, is the Kurds' major ally and regional sponsor, as Hersh reported in a previous New Yorker piece. Their agents, said Hersh, are crawling all over Kurdistan, even as they recognize that the American attempt to pacify the rest of Iraq is failing. This is their "Plan B," as Hersh calls it: if Iraq is being split apart at the seams, their best option is to grab a piece of it as it decomposes. That Kirkuk-to-Israel pipeline Chalabi promised his neocon backers may not be a pipe dream after all, especially if the Kurds succeed in their plan to shift the ethnic balance of oil-rich Kirkuk and seize control of the city they hail as their Jerusalem. This has American officers worried, and it contradicts the much-touted "pro-American" reputation of the Kurds as our trusted friends and allies: American commanders fear the Kurdish militias are about to precipitate a civil war, with our troops caught in the crossfire.
Once we make this an air war, the Kurdish parties will wield American jet fighters as a whip to be used against their sectarian enemies, lashing out at the Arabs, the Assyrians, and anyone else who gets in their way. While Shi'ite and Kurdish death squads comb the streets, carrying out search and destroy missions against alleged "terrorists," the Americans will patrol the skies, zapping entire villages as directed by our proxies on the ground.
There's just one problem with this strategy: "It's not going to work," says the former director of air power studies at the Royal Air Force's advanced staff college, Andrew Brookes, now an analyst with the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. Hersh cites him as asking a very pertinent question, one that conjures up the same ghosts of interventions past channeled by van Creveld.
"'Can you put a lid on the insurgency with bombing? No. You can concentrate in one area, but the guys will spring up in another town.' The inevitable reliance on Iraqi ground troops' targeting would also create conflicts. 'I don't see your guys dancing to the tune of someone else,' Brookes said. He added that he and many other experts 'don't believe that airpower is a solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the ground with airpower didn't work in Vietnam, did it?'"
The neocons hate the Vietnam analogy precisely because it suits the facts so snugly. They don't like to be reminded that their last great crusade to implant "democracy" at gunpoint ended not just in failure, but in a full-fledged military defeat. To even bring up the subject is to be accused of wanting to repeat that result – as if the critics of the policy, rather than the policymakers, are to be held morally responsible for the consequences of the course our rulers have chosen.
As the barbarian torturers we've unleashed on the Iraqis cause even our own guy, Iyad Allawi, to aver that things have gotten worse since the overthrow of Saddam, and attacks on American forces escalate along with the casualty rate, those few defenders of the war outside the White House ascribe rising opposition to those Sixties-era lefties who, we are told, want to recreate their glory days of bell-bottomed, love-beaded protest politics. It's all about "Boomer narcissism." Or so they say.
When it comes to the course this war is about to take, however, it is the narcissism of one particular Baby Boomer that carries the most weight, and George W. Bush is fundamentally different from his generational fellows in ways that are rather frightening. Hersh, citing administration insiders as well as military sources, paints a portrait of a president so caught up in his own sense of historic and religious mission as to be virtually inaccessible, either to reasoned argument or plain common sense:
"'The president is more determined than ever to stay the course,' the former defense official said. 'He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage "People may suffer and die, but the Church advances."' He said that the president had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney. 'They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,' the former defense official said. Bush's public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. 'Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,' the former official said, 'but Bush has no idea.'"
Bush is a prisoner of his own demons, and we, in this era of the imperial presidency, are his prisoners, as he steers the country on a reckless road to ruin. The idea that there is something very wrong with that man in the White House, that he is wreathed in a darkness of potentially apocalyptic deadliness – that he is, in short, a deeply disturbed and dangerous individual – is chilling. From the image of the president as benevolent father-figure, we have come, in the historical blink of an eye that marks the time since the days of Dwight Eisenhower, to the chief executive as a reckless and wanton destroyer – not Zeus, but Loki. Blind to evidence, and rendered half-mad by a toxic mix of religious and ideological fervor, the most powerful man in the world is on a death-dealing rampage. No different, really, than one of those crazed gunmen you read about in the news, who go on a spectacular crime spree, kidnapping and murdering their way across several state lines, holding hostages and threatening to kill them the whole way.
We are, all of us, George W. Bush's hostages, and, what's especially scary is that we don't know what he's going to do next. He seems capable of anything. Hersh reports the creation of a special squadron detailed to crossing over the border and pursuing the insurgents into Syria, and certainly we have every reason to expect this war to spread. The reversion to air power perhaps augurs the dawning of new "shock and awe" campaigns, this time over Damascus and points west. This is what the War Party is gunning for, and unless popular opposition to the war forces an American withdrawal along lines suggested by Rep. Murtha – out in six months – that is exactly the prospect we face. We must escalate, or get out – we cannot "stay the course." The president and his advisers are beginning to realize this, and, given Bush's views – after all, I didn't entitle a column "George W. Bush, Trotskyite" for nothing – I leave it to the imagination of my readers which option he will choose.
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